It's a heck of a comment, but I stand by it in alot of ways. I've been working with Netapps for 18 years now and I have to say I can't recall every having a disk die and lose data. I've come close mind you!
I had an F740 with the DEC StorageWorks cannisters and I had a dual disk failure in an aggregate. Luckily, one disk died at the head/platter, but the other died in the controller board. I cracked open the cannisters, swapped controller boards on the drives and I was able to get back up and running. About four hours of downtime I admit, but no data loss. All of this was done with Netapp TechSupport on the line.
And of course this was all under OnTap 5.x maybe? Maybe 6.x, but I can't remember, it was over 12 years ago, so the details are hazy, but I could dig up an old email on this if you like. :-)
But I *still* stand by my comment. If the box is under Netapp Support, it's in Netapp's interest to make sure they use good drives, otherwise they're going to be eating alot of profit with more frequent swaps. And don't think they won't have the drive vendors doing lots of triage on the problem as well, with on-sight people looking at all returned drives.
If you are going third party... then I guess you could ask for this info, but I would argue you'd also need to know the drive age, firmware level, etc to make a determination that really means something.
Sure, go for the warm fuzzies of knowing that you've got drive X in your array... but I wouldn't count on it meaning much. As it's been shown for many years, once the initial die off happens on drives, if they are kept spinning, they tend to keep spinning for quite a while. It's the spin down/up that kills drives the most quickly.
Douglas> Thats a heck of a comment there. I've seen many cases where Douglas> Netapp shipped disks with known high failure rates. If this Douglas> was something known or suspected I'd have no issues asking a Douglas> vendor to do the same. I'd expect the vendor to comply.
Wasn't this during the flooding in Thailand that knocked out a bunch of factories, which led to the huge increases in drive prices? I'm sure Netapp and alot of other disk vendors had to accept what they were offered at that time and deal with it.
Disks die. It doesn't matter who makes em. They all go through good/bad phases.
John