I have a question. A month or so back we had massive performance problems on our 3170A and disks were 100% for no apparent reason (SATA drives).
Netapp eventually tracked down the problem to snapshot deletion. It seems that blocks are zeroed as they are returned to the aggregate. It was taking longer than 60 mins to delete the hourly snapshots.
So, my questions are:
1) has anybody else seen this problem and been forced to avoid hourly snaps? 2) is there any way to disable the zeroing of freed blocks? 3) has anybody heard of a plan for a fix which would allow us to use hourly snaps again? It seems bizarre that a useful feature, which we have used for a long time, has become unusable. Basically, it appears I/O is doubled becuase the blocks are written when used, then written when freed. Regards, pdg