About a year ago, we bought a filer (720) with a single FCAL shelf, populated with five 9gig drives. This was about all the storage we needed at the time (for mail spool storage), but knew we could just add a couple of extra drives if we needed more storage.
Now, we are looking at adding another large customer (another ISP) to our mail system, and needed a bit more storage. Adding another 9gigs or so would be fine. So, I figured we'd just fill the shelf with drives, and be happy.
Netapp tells me that I can't buy 9GB drives anymore. They've proposed upgrading to a new shelf full of 18GB drives, and trading in the existing shelf. Needless to say, the price is exorbitant compared to just adding a couple 9GB drives as we had expected. I'm looking for alternatives.
Is anyone selling old 9GB drives for Netapp? If so, please contact me directly so we can work something out.
Does anyone have any information on how/where to source non-Netapp drives that will work in our system?
Can I use 18GB drives in this shelf (and only use the first 9GB of each)? I've gotten conflicting answers about this from Netapp.
Any other ideas?
TIA
-j
"jason" == Jason Lavoie jason@mint.net writes:
jason> Netapp tells me that I can't buy 9GB drives anymore. They've jason> proposed upgrading to a new shelf full of 18GB drives, and jason> trading in the existing shelf. Needless to say, the price is jason> exorbitant compared to just adding a couple 9GB drives as we jason> had expected. I'm looking for alternatives.
Yep, stopped selling them a while back, much to my chagrin. With the 36gb drives coming out, I'd almost sorta expect the price on the 18gb drives to drop, but...
jason> Is anyone selling old 9GB drives for Netapp? If so, please jason> contact me directly so we can work something out.
I'm just about to trade-in a bunch of them. Maybe be rep would sell 'em to ya. ;-)
jason> Does anyone have any information on how/where to source jason> non-Netapp drives that will work in our system?
Eh. You're not planning on keeping your NetApp support, then ?
jason> Can I use 18GB drives in this shelf (and only use the first 9GB jason> of each)? I've gotten conflicting answers about this from jason> Netapp.
Don't Do That. It Hurts. Unless those are old 9gb FC-AL disks. Mixing SCSI and FC-AL works, but perfomance drops off quite a lot. We just stopped doing that this weekend, and our 760 is *much* happier...
K.
----- Original Message ----- From: Kendall Libby fubar@mathworks.com To: Jason Lavoie jason@mint.net Cc: toasters@mathworks.com Sent: Tuesday, February 22, 2000 2:00 PM Subject: 9GB disks
"jason" == Jason Lavoie jason@mint.net writes:
jason> Can I use 18GB drives in this shelf (and only use the first 9GB jason> of each)? I've gotten conflicting answers about this from jason> Netapp.
Don't Do That. It Hurts. Unless those are old 9gb FC-AL disks.
He said they were FC-AL.
I don't know if his shelf supports 18GB. If they do, adding new ones is trivial. You actually don't use just the first 9GB; what happens is the first 18GB will become the parity disk, so your old 9GB disk would become available for data. Then subsequent 18GB disks will give you the full 18GB of space each.
If you need a new shelf, then you could buy a new shelf, and still use the old 9GB disks in it.
Bruce
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Bruce Sterling Woodcock -
fubar＠mathworks.com -
Jason Lavoie