Will Murnane wrote: > 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). >
Never confuse price with cost. Price is set by market forces. -- richard _______________________________________________ zfs-discuss mailing list zfs-discuss@opensolaris.org http://mail.opensolaris.org/mailman/listinfo/zfs-discuss
