I'm trying to figure out if the toasters always have just one volume, or if I can have a few shelves as 4 gig, and a few as 9 gig, and use 2 mount points (one for the 9G and one for the 4G shelves).
You can have multiple volumes, but you don't need to multiple volumes just because you have disks of different sizes.
Can we take a fast/wide card and a shelf of 9GIG to expand, or will the 9G drives be treated like 4G drives, and I'll loose the extra 5G per drive?
When you add disks to a volume, the filer will use the full available storage of the new disk, with two exceptions. The first exception is that if the new disk is larger than any of the others in the RAID group to which it is added, parity will migrate to the new disk, so adding just one 9GB disk to a RAID group composed of 4GB disks will only get you an additional 4GB of usable storage. (The next 9GB disk will result in an additional 9GB, however.)
The second exception is that the filer has to *replace* a disk, the new disk won't have any more usable space than the old one -- if you have only 9GB spares and a 4GB disk fails, you'll end up with 5GB of wasted space. If you have spares of multiple sizes, the filer will pick the best one, so it's good to have at least one spare of each size in your system unless you don't mind some wasted space. You can always replace the smaller disk and then fail the large/wasted one to recover the storage.
-- Karl Swartz - Technical Marketing Engineer Network Appliance Work: kls@netapp.com http://www.netapp.com/ Home: kls@chicago.com http://www.chicago.com/~kls/