- I was told by a NetApp sales engineer to reserve 4 disks for spares. This
sounded like overkill to me. Does anyone have an opinion about this?
I cannot speak from experience, but I understand the IDE disks in this R100 are replaced fairly often. You'll want many more spares than for a production Netapp filer.
- After the NearStore disks are right sized, how much usable space is left?
Can't answer that.
- Is it a bad thing to have the root volume contain data? I will be using
the NearStore to store radiology images. The image files are large, static files.
Very bad. Let's say you have a 2x36 root volume. This would leave you with 20+GB of data space. If you wrote 15GB of data in there, then replaced those files with updated radiology images, that's 30GB total (the old files would be kept in snapshot). Your volume would overflow.
The root volume filling up is not a "good thing" (tm). In our filers, we have the root or vol0 volume be 2 disks dedicated to that purpose. NO DATA. It's a waste, but it makes for a more stable filer.
Of course, if you disabled snapshots completely, you'd have nothing to worry about in the above case. But then you'd be defeating one of the best features of filers.
/Brian/