+--- In our lifetime, Tom Yates madhatta@mathworks.com wrote: | | 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.
I believe this is due to file system limitations; the 220 was limited to 50G, the 330 to 100G. Only the 540's were to be able to raise the file system limit by using 9G drives. The upgrade proc should be like going from the 2G to 4G drives (fail the parity, rebuild on the 1st new large drive).
This could be a technical limitation (doubtful) or a marketing imposed one (very probable). What better incentive to get you to buy (or upgrade) your existing filer to a shinny new one than being out of space? (not that there is anything wrong with that).
So, rather than spanding $15k or so (this is a pure speculation as to what NetApp certified 9GB disks may cost) on 3 drives and only getting 9GB worth of space, you should probably just fill the rest out with 4G drives.
Perhaps there may be a better explanation for this.
Alexei