StoreVault s550 HD Replacement or Hacks

[dschartung]

So, since NetApp decided to axe the SV line and leave me with a $6000 unsupported SAN/NAS I've had a rough time tracking down drive trays. I tried kludging a tray with an off-the-shelf SATA drive, but the SV didn't like it and refused to boot ONTAP with the drive installed. The HD lights went green but after 10 minutes the system never rebooted and never received status 11 on the front panel.

Did SV use a particular firmware or data partition on the OEM drives?

My next step is remove a known working drive and clone it with G4U and place the clone in the S550 and see if it rebuilds the drive.

I wonder if it is possible to install FreeNAS over ONTAP?

 

[dschartung]

Looking at the boot screen on the StoreVault it seems to be standard x86 hardware, ONTAP even has a grub menu. I'm sure adding a USB pci card so I could get keyboard and mouse input and a bootable USB thumbdrive might help in getting FreeNAS installed. ZFS here I come.

 

[RMGBELGIUM]

problem is that netapp uses only netapp qualified disks, and using an off the tray disk will not work.It recognises this as a non-qualified disk, and the system will stop functioning after a while with this disk ( as you experienced ). NetApp uses its own firmware on their disks .

rgds,

R.

NetApp Certified NCDA/NCIE-SAN

 

[dschartung]

Interesting since this is what I always assumed about their drives and firmware. However, another company we do business with has an s550 and filled it with off the shelf Maxtor 750GB SATA drives. The uptime for them has been over 10 months.