Please note that I left out the 10% WAFL overhead initially – the figures above are updated to be correct.

- An aggregate is similar to a volume group under Linux in that it contains the actual volumes that you use (FlexVols). With the 8×1TB drives, you’d get an aggregate of 4.36TB; if you left the aggregate and volume snapshot reserves at their default, you could make one volume of 3.31TB; however, you could set both reserves to zero – just understand the drawbacks of this before you do it – and create a 4.36TB FlexVol. (You could also, of course, create multiple smaller FlexVols in one containing aggregate.)

- You are correct that the limitation is that you would not have continuous storage space when you create a second aggregate – and that you’re spending more money on parity drives than you would with a Filer that could handle larger aggregates.

- With 12×1TB, you could create an aggregate using up to 8 disks in one RAID group; you could use the four leftover drives for spares, but it would be exceedingly inefficient to try to create a usable volume from them, particularly if you try to create a RAID-DP group with them.

-The 2050 has the same limits as the rest of the NetApp FAS product line – for instance, you can make an 11.4TB aggregate out of 26 750GB drives (two RAID-DP groups, so four drives are used for parity), after WAFL overhead and with the default 5% aggregate snapshot on.

- When I use a 8×1TB drives, the aggregate limit is 4.85TB, does this mean that the maximum filesystem size I get is that (75% * 4.85TB) ? Is that aggregate like Linux’s “volume group” ?

- When I install a new shelf with similar 8×1TB, I get “another” filesystem of the same size, so the limitation in reality is that those 2 file systems are separate and not one continuous storage space ?

- If I fill the internal 12×1TB disks, doesn’t that give the maximum aggregate size limit?

- How much did the 2050 raise the limits

Thanks for all the help