Yesterday, we received a call from a customer complaining about how unreliable the Maxtor drives were in his R150. We had a long discussion about the reliability problems of the drives and he could not understand why NetApp uses unreliable drives. He had been reading my blog about the BCS and ZCS issues and was also steamed that NetApp is selling drives that are less reliable and have less error checking than the drives they used to sell.

I explained that he was not alone, and we agreed that NetApp is much more focused on profitability then reliability. Anyone can read NetApp’s founder’s Blog and see that he writes about the size of the company, moving engineering to India, and avoids issues related to reliability.

But what do I know? NetApp is growing, so perhaps customers don’t care about reliability anymore.