About a year ago, we bought a filer (720) with a single FCAL shelf, populated with five 9gig drives. This was about all the storage we needed at the time (for mail spool storage), but knew we could just add a couple of extra drives if we needed more storage.
Now, we are looking at adding another large customer (another ISP) to our mail system, and needed a bit more storage. Adding another 9gigs or so would be fine. So, I figured we'd just fill the shelf with drives, and be happy.
Netapp tells me that I can't buy 9GB drives anymore. They've proposed upgrading to a new shelf full of 18GB drives, and trading in the existing shelf. Needless to say, the price is exorbitant compared to just adding a couple 9GB drives as we had expected. I'm looking for alternatives.
Is anyone selling old 9GB drives for Netapp? If so, please contact me directly so we can work something out.
Does anyone have any information on how/where to source non-Netapp drives that will work in our system?
Can I use 18GB drives in this shelf (and only use the first 9GB of each)? I've gotten conflicting answers about this from Netapp.
Any other ideas?
TIA
-j