Re: [BLUG] new big computer for a lab

There is one important aspect to buying drives off of newegg for a
server: if the replacement drives have fewer sectors than the original
drives in the array they won't work. Since hard drive vendors play it
pretty loose with how they define capacity, its kind of a crap shoot.

Apple bit me on that one -- the replacement 80G drive for the system
disk mirror was about 2M smaller than the original drive so I had to
rebuild the mirror by hand. One drive was a Maxtor and the other was a
Seagate. I wouldn't be surprised if different models of 80G drives from
the same manufacturer would have different sector counts.

All of our servers are IBM (except for that stupid Mac) and when you get
a replacement drive from them its the exact same drive. We had some
older pSeries machines (one was 9 years old) and the replacement drives
were IBM refurbs of the original drives.

Brian

On Tue, 2010-05-18 at 16:14 -0400, Simón Ruiz wrote:
> On Tue, May 18, 2010 at 10:13 AM, Mark Krenz <mark@slugbug.org> wrote:
> > Here is an option for a server hard drive from Dell's website just now:
> >
> > 1TB 7.2K RPM SATA 3Gbps 3.5-in Cabled Hard Drive [$449.00]
> >
> > From Newegg:
> >
> > Western Digital RE3 WD1002FBYS 1TB 7200 RPM SATA Drive - $159.99
> >
> > So with 12 drives that's $3480 overpaid.
> >
> >
> >
> > --
> > Mark Krenz
> > Bloomington Linux Users Group
> > http://www.bloomingtonlinux.org/
> > _______________________________________________
> > BLUG mailing list
> > BLUG@linuxfan.com
> > http://mailman.cs.indiana.edu/mailman/listinfo/blug
> >
>
> You hit the biggest problem/easiest fix on the nose.
>
> We got a great deal from Dell on some file servers and RAID enclosures.
>
> It was the end of the quarter, and the salesperson seemed to be
> working towards a quota or something, because we got an awesome price
> on the whole shebang.
>
> When we went *back* (when the time pressure was off) to ask them for
> an extra couple of SATA hard disks for it (we also needed these
> caddies/sleds to slide the disks in right;they only give you exactly
> enough, which I think is their form of "DRM" to get you to go buy
> everything from them). They pointed to prices like those and I just
> laughed. I pointed out that I could easily buy the equipment I wanted
> from elsewhere for more than 75% off their price, and the salesperson
> observed that such hard disks would not be covered by Dell tech
> support.
>
> I pointed out that I've never asked for tech support on "Dell hard
> drives", and that if I bought twice the number of hard drives so I had
> an entire set of drives on hand to swap out I'd still be paying less
> than half what Dell wanted; that the economics of the situation
> demanded Dell lower their price if they expected us to take them
> seriously.
>
> There was absolutely no reply to that, so I went on eBay for the right
> caddies, and bought the SATA drives from NewEgg.
>
> I've yet to regret it.
>
> Simón
>
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