if i understand correctly, whilst i will shortly be allowed to mix 4s and 9s, i won't be allowed to use a full set of 9s - in fact, i'll be limited to 21*4 + 3*9 for data, with one hot spare and one parity, leaving me two disc slots i can't use.
We have no capability in our software, at this time, to *remove* a disk drive from the array. The data on a 4-GB disk drive is mapped as such. You can add 9-GB disk drives to an array, and they will be used as 9-GB disk drives. But if they replace an existing 4-GB disk drive, they will be seen by the system as 4-GB of data. I agree it would be useful to be able to map the additional space on the replacement disk drive, but the software doesn't have that capability at this time.
What you can do, of course, is dump your data to tape (or some other location), rebuild your file system entirely with 9-GB disk drives, and then reload the data onto the newly-defined array. I know that this is very inconvenient, and I'm not suggesting that you should do it, I'm only pointing out that it is possible.
-- Andy
Andy Watson Director, Technical Marketing watson@netapp.com Network Appliance +1 408 367 3220 voice 2770 San Tomas Expressway +1 408 367 3151 fax Santa Clara, CA 95051 http://www.netapp.com/
"It's really stupid to be an intellectual when you're young. You should be an intellectual when you're a hundred years old and can't feel anything anymore." -- a character in Bruce Sterling's novel, HOLY FIRE