Ian,

I apologize. A simple 'no thanks' would have done. I had no intention of bothering you. I was simply trying to help as I could tell from your previous posts that you were completely ignorant when it comes to fibre channel disk firmware, block size, formatting, RAID, etc. I was trying to provide a simple solution that you might understand.

Your best option in my opinion would be using a 16 bay shelf with a hardware RAID module from the same manufacturer. I would use disks that have factory generic firmware and format them 512 bps.

If you are set on using NetApp DS14's, then at least format the disks 512bps. Disk manufacturers provide free utilities and there are several expensive commercial sofftware options to accomplish this.

Your hardware RAID options are limited. I can suggest the Mylex ExtremeRAID 3000 which is a PCI hardware fibre channel RAID card which is Windows compatible. This is a copper card with two HSSDC connectors so depending on which style LRC's you have, you may need to do some optical to copper conversion.

Now the LRC and the disk firmware were designed for NetApp, so you would still be better off with generic disk firmware and a shelf designed to be Windows compatible.

Better yet, just put these DS14's back on a filer and run FCP.

Thank you, Tim -----Original Message----- From: "Iain Barnetson"Iain.Barnetson@Halliburton.com Sent: 3/26/05 2:41:19 PM To: "toasters@mathworks.com"toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: reuse old NetApp shelf

yeah yeah yeah Am I in the Ebay forum or something? I've had more replies offereing to buy these things or sell me something else than answers to the question...........good grief!! Please DO NOT email me trying to sell me something or buy something from me, ok? Thanks.

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From: Timothy Naple [mailto:tnaple@BERKCOM.com] Sent: 26 March 2005 17:29 To: Iain Barnetson Subject: RE: reuse old NetApp shelf

Ian,

I could offer a trade for some generic shelves and disks that work fine on Windows. I could use the NetApp storage. If that sounds at all interesting, let me know.

Thanks, Tim Timothy Naple tnaple@berkcom.com 510-384-1033 Cell 510-644-1599 Office 510-644-1598 Fax

Berkeley Communications Corporation 2990 San Pablo Avenue Berkeley, CA 94702 http://www.berkcom.com http://www.berkcom.com/

-----Original Message----- From: Iain Barnetson [mailto:Iain.Barnetson@Halliburton.com] Sent: Saturday, March 26, 2005 5:20 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: RE: reuse old NetApp shelf

I've tired low level formatting two of the disks using the Qlogic card bios facility which suceeded with no error messages. I then came back into windows and still couldn't do anything with the disks. I've tried creating a partition using both diskpart and gdisk32 but still no joy. Gdisk32 creates a partition but still windows wants to initialize the disks but can't. diskpart sits there using cpu cycles, so far for 3 hours, and doesn't seem to be doing very much.

Any ideas how I can get these drives in a usuable state?

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From: Fox, Adam [mailto:Adam.Fox@netapp.com] Sent: 25 March 2005 17:14 To: Iain Barnetson Subject: RE: reuse old NetApp shelf

You'll probably have to low-level format the drives to use 512 byte blocks. I'm guessing Windows isn't thrilled with the 520-byte blocks that NTAP uses.

-- Adam Fox adamfox@netapp.com mailto:adamfox@netapp.com

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From: Iain Barnetson [mailto:Iain.Barnetson@Halliburton.com] Sent: Friday, March 25, 2005 11:50 AM To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: Re: reuse old NetApp shelf

I've got a couple of NetApp DS14 fibre disk shelves from our "old" filers that I'd like to reuse. I attached one of the shelves to a server using a Qlogic 2200 card and although Windows detected the drives correctly I couldn't partition them or anything - no specific error message just saying that it couldn't.

What I'm wondering is:

Should I use the Qlogic card facility to low level format them? Will that make them usable in Windows?

Any suggestions on how I can implement RAID with these disks other than Windows software RAID?

Regards, Iain