[SunHELP] Will non-Sun disks work in ZFS appliance?

[Geoffrey Reed]

On 10/18/12 11:18 AM, "Sandwich Maker" <adh at an.bradford.ma.us> wrote:

> " From: Alan McKay <alan.mckay+sun at gmail.com>
> " 
> " Hey folks,
> " 
> " I have a ZFS 7120 that is out of service agreement and darn those
> " disks are expensive!  $2K for a 3T drive that will act as a 2T (2T no
> " longer available).
> " 
> " I know Sun puts its own BIOS on the drives but I hope that does not
> " mean it will prevent me from using a generic drive.
> " 
> " Can I just pick up the equivalent SAS drive from Seagate (or other) and use
> it?
> " A 2T Seagate SAS drive is $282!!!
> 
> it always used to be possible; afaik sun's 'bios' wasn't much more
> than performance tweaks for their environment.  scsi is scsi, and
> anyone's drives would work if they were sun formatted first.
> 
> i don't know if things have changed in the last decade-odd.  if it
> still works, see format[1m].

Some of them were just changing the model# and branding to sun.  no
difference in some of the drive firmware except for those 2 changes.