On Thu, Jul 10, 2008 at 12:14, Richard Elling <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Drive carriers are a different ballgame. AFAIK, there is no > industry standard carrier that meets our needs. We require > service LEDs for many of our modern disk carriers, so there > is a little bit of extra electronics there. You will see more > electronics for some of the newer products as I explain here: > http://blogs.sun.com/relling/entry/this_ain_t_your_daddy While I do appreciate the need for redundancy, and thus interposers, I wish Sun's pricing on the disk/interposer combinations were a little more aggressive. Here's current costs straight from Sun's site: XTA-ST1NJ-250G7K $ 170.00 250GB XTA-ST1NJ-500G7K $ 400.00 500GB XTA-ST1NJ-750G7K $ 525.00 750GB XTA-ST1NJ-1T7K $ 950.00 1000GB Compare for a moment with prices for raw disks (Seagate NS series, from ZipZoomFly; I picked these because they look an awful lot like what I got when I bought disks from Sun): ST3250310NS $70 250GB ST3500320NS $100 500GB ST3750330NS $150 750GB ST31000340NS $235 1000GB So for a 250 gig drive the interposer and caddy etc cost me $100, for a 500 gb disk it costs me $300, for a 750 it costs $375, and for 1TB disks it costs an extra $715! Look at it another way - if I buy a 250GB disk from Sun and a 1TB disk of my own for the prices above, it costs me $405, less than half what buying a 1TB disk from Sun would cost. I can buy two of those assemblies for less than one from Sun, and leave one as a cold spare.
Another way to look at it: Suppose that Sun charges a flat $100 for the extra electronics. Then the 250GB disk is priced at market value, the 500 at three times market, the 750 at 2.8 times market, and the 1TB at 3.6 times market. If the prices on disks were lower on these, they would be interesting for low-end businesses or even high-end home users. The chassis is within reach of reasonable, but the disk prices look ludicrously high from where I sit. An empty one only costs $3k, sure, but fill it with twelve disks and it's up to $20k. Are there some extra electronics required for larger disks that help explain this steep slope of cost? I can't think of any reasons off the top of my head (other than the understandable profit motive). Will _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
