Some newer drives please? 18gig drives please? It *can't* be that hard to allow 18gig drives...if it is your programmers didn't do their job correctly.
It's not a matter of programming -- going from 4GB to 9GB was painless in that regard, and 18GB drives would be no different. The problem is in qualifying drives to our standards of reliability (and possibly getting them in sufficient quantity).
Before I joined NetApp, I was a customer. We wanted 9GB drives because we had some very large physics datasets and didn't want an enormous number of drives. NetApp would only sell us 4GB drives, saying that they had tried the then-current 9GB drives (5.25" full-height) and found them woefully lacking in reliability.
NetApp lost that business. We bought IBM RS/6000s and third-party boxes loaded with 9GB drives. We weren't that worried about data loss because it was all either staging space for tape drives, or work space for analysis work that could be restarted without undue pain.
We quickly found that we were spending a lot of our time replacing 9GB drives, and restarting physics apps whose output was lost. Next time we bought additional storage, we bought filers -- still with 4GB drives, but they worked and we were a lot happier.
-- Karl Swartz - Technical Marketing Engineer Network Appliance kls@netapp.com (W) kls@chicago.com (H)