I was wondering if anyone can help. We are a small shop with 2 F330's with 2 disk cabinets on each one. We were looking into adding another tray on each, but were told by NetApps that they are no longer available.

All I'm looking for is to upgrade the memory, add another scsi controller, and another tray (is that asking TOO MUCH???). Questions: Can I use off the shelf memory (and what kind)? What about SCSI controllers? Where can I get disk trays? Could we instead replace the drives with 9G or 18G drives (and what model would we use)?

NetApps solution is to spend $60k+ to upgrade, and all we need is another 10G - 20G. The current system works fine, isn't overused, and could handle the expansion IF WE CAN FIND THE COMPONENTS...

We are in a somewhat similar situation here. We have one F330, with Seagate Hawk 4 GB disks (ST15230N), running 4.3.3D2. The system is 2.5 years old. We have lost *one* disk (so the hot spare was put into use), and we are thus running a system with no hot spare. We don't particularly like this situation.

The Netapp vendor here in Norway tells us that they can no longer get hold of new ST15230Ns, and in general there seems to be quite a problem to get hold of *narrow* disks that can be used with the existing controllers.

Questions:

- Does anybody know of narrow disks that can be purchased today and which will work with 4.3.3D2? (I have come to point that I no longer care if the disks are Netapp approved - I just want to have a reasonable chance of the disks working.)

- We have a number of (used) DEC RZ29B 4 GB disks, fw revision 0007. Will these work?

- We feel that the F330 is more or less abandoned, and any kind of upgrade with new disk shelves etc. is going to extremely expensive. Is this a correct assessment?

Steinar Haug, Nethelp consulting, sthaug@nethelp.no