> To me, hard drives today are as much a commodity item as network cable, > GBICs, NICs, DVD drives, etc.
They are and they aren't. Reliability, particularly in high-heat & vibration environments, can vary quite a bit. > For sun to charge 4-8 times street price for hard drives that they order just > the same > as I do from the same manufacturers that I order from is infuriating. I won't argue with that, I remember when all the vendors were doing that. Maybe they still are, at least the ones who still sell drives. :-) But in the particular case of a Thumper, I think Sun is doing the right thing by selling only qualified drives. That is a very dense case. Not every drive with the right form factor will work reliably in it. Even drives which work in another dense case may not work reliably because the heat & vibration profile is different. That's a separate issue from the price charged for the drives; but I'd be very hesitant to sell and support a system without drives if I knew that only certain drives would work without "cooking" or excessive seek errors. This message posted from opensolaris.org _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
