We recently purchased an F630 system with 26 9GB drives (two shelf pairs of 13 drives).
Because multiple RAID groups (and to a less extent, multiple filesystems) are not supported, I have concerns about bringing a 200GB filesystem into the world. All of the space won't be needed for at least several months. The main problems brought on by large filesystems and are backup dataset size (and time), but the biggest concern is that when a disk goes, the raid reconstruction affects more of your data if you have a single RAID group. (As well as worse fault tolerance, etc.)
And since we can add new drives by swapping them in, it doesn't seem like it would hurt to only bring 13 drives online at first. Since we have an active filesystem, can someone tell me what the best route to do this is? Any caveats?
I have had one report from someone at NetApp that I should erase disk labels (I don't know if he meant all of them, just the ones being removed, or the ones staying) before starting, and another that it would be fine to just yank the disks I don't want and newfs the remaining ones.
Dan