On 4 Feb 1999 19:01:17 -0800, Benn, Paul paul.benn@netapp.com wrote:
I can't vouch for whether or not a Filer's CPU can be upgraded but I can point something else out....
A 90MHz Pentium has an internal clock speed of 60MHz and a multiplier of 1.5 (60x1.5=90). On motherboards that allow configuration changes there are usually (at least) two jumpers, one for clock speed and another for the multiplier. A Pentium 133 has an internal speed of 66 and a multiplier of 2 (66x2=132 or 133). So, as you can see, a simple chip swap won't work (actually, it might work but without proper mother board support you'd still have a Pentium 90).
This is correct, but you could look up the motherboard documentation, and find the clock jumpers. From what I recall however, back in the P90 days, chips were still using 5V (well maybe the P90, was the first Pentium to switch to 3.3V), and I'm pretty sure that motherboards back then didn't support faster CPUs, so I'm enclined to believe the netapp folks when they say that those systems can't easily be upgraded.
What you can do, is get a new motherboard (say an MVP3 based MB, with an AMD 350, and 512M of RAM), but I'd be willing to bet that it's not going to work because most likely the intel netapp code will barf on some unknown chipset (MVP3, PCI bridge, or god knows what else). Should you have an old netapp that you're truly not doing anything with, and don't mind taking apart, you can always try with a somewhat less recent pentium motherboard, but I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work. Obviously, you also can't expect to ever call NA about that system again :-)
Marc