Hitachi Drives for Blue Arc / HDS

me: not likely, i think they have a custom firmware on them and the system would reject any drive without a 'blessed' firmware.

Is this true? has anyone put drives into their BA/HDS system which were not sourced from HDS/Blue Arc?

he: can we buy 'blessed' drives on the internets?

me: maybe.. lets check..

so we search for "HUS723020ALS641" which is the model number of our slower storage drives in the system. Google returned no results on that string, it did find lots of instances of "HUS723020ALA641" where the only difference is the S and A in the ones we found for sale online. So ALA vrs ALS. the ALA ones are only 200 dollars new.

Now I assume that 'S' is indicating a different firmware. the funny thing is quite often HDS will send us the wrong drive when we lose one. They'll send me one which appears to be the proper physical drive, but comes in a NetApp sled, for the E5400s or Dells' 3x60. Most of the numbers, even the model number and revision are the same. I called support one time and asked them if i could swap the drive into the proper sled and RMA the failed drive with the improper sled they sent. I was told yes.

Based on that, i think its safe to assume NetApp and HDS do not share any custom firmwares they may be using, and these are not overly proprietary drives but rather perhaps drives which passed a higher level of QA and are reserved for enterprise storage vendors. (or maybe TLER types vrs non TLER, or whatever that is which prevents you from using them in a RAID setup).

Further to that, whenever you upgrade your SMU/Titans sometimes it'll indicate its updating the firmware on the drives. I mention this as I wonder if he does put in the non ALS drives, if they'll be 'upgraded' to the current array firmware version anyway.

Now the flip side of that and to add confusion, these drives are going into an LSI chassis (RS12), NetApp owned LSI for awhile, so perhaps there is something there, as both BA and NA were offering common shelves (re-branded of course) for a period of time.

bah.. so the question remains ,.... have you ever used drives not sourced from HDS (or an 'official' channel) in your blue arc?