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Going Deep Inside Xserve Apple Drive Modules
adamengst writes "If you've had an Xserve drive fail, you may have considered saving some money by putting a replacement drive inside its Apple Drive Module. That may be a false economy, though. TidBITS explains why, while pinning Apple down on exactly what goes into Apple Drive Modules and why they cost so much more than bare retail drives."
Apple dude discovers that servers use, well, server class HDs and they cost more than normal ones.
Oh, and the 'sleds' that hold the HDs have some LEDs (cool!) and a controller board to work with the cooling system.
Like pretty much every other half decent server then.
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
That ain't no 3rd-party article, it's an Apple sales brochure.
Disgusting.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
... nicely. Quoting TFA - "About a year ago, we bought an Intel-based Xserve with a pair of 80 GB SATA drives to act as our primary Web server. When the boot drive went flaky on us in October 2008, ... "
Welcome to pragmatism and reality - Drives fail all the times. So use cheaper drives in redundant mode, replace them with cheaper drives when they fail. You would have saved good amount of money even if the cheaper drives failed three time more than the costlier ones. (450$ for 1TB vs $100 for 1TB - from the same article.)
This retarded fluff piece aside, the reason people buy (and pay a premium) for oem "blessed" hard drive replacements is because they JUST FUCKING WORK. If I save $100 on a hard drive, but spend two hours dicking with the raid controller to get it to play nice, or find out that it is in fact 2 mb smaller then the other drives, and now the raid won't rebuild, or has some firmware issue that I now need to rig up something to update, etc. I've lost money.
There is value in having everything already tested, and all your equipment in a "supported" configuration. When you have problems it makes it that much easier.
The fact that this article was apparently written by someone who does not know the difference between SAS and SATA makes it completely worthless. Clearly they are not qualified to admin the server they do have, much less write articles about the technical benefits of apple drives over other replacements.