Seems like the real question is would customers be willing to trade rebuild time for additional capacity on the low end. I'd certainly like to see the option available because we would favor high capacity whereas other customers may favor low rebuild times.
This is a tough question. There's an old UNIX saying:
We sell rope. If you hang yourself, it's your own fault.
I think that part of what distinguishes appliance vendors is that we don't like to sell rope. For instance, we've got no way to disable RAID in our system, and we always include NV-RAM.
On the other hand, as our customers become more sophisticated and familiar with our products, perhaps it does make sense to be more flexible.
Dave Hitz hitz@netapp.com Network Appliance (408) 367-3106