Why are Dell Hard Drives so expensive!

[Zillatech]

Let me clarify,

If I was building my own server, I would strongly consider putting in my own drives assuming full responsibility of course.

If I was advising someone else, I would explain to them the differences and let them make the call since it would be their money and not mine.

 

[coolVariable]

Bought a dell server with the cheapest/smallest drive available.
Installed WD RE4 drives from Newegg - no problem.
If there is a hardware issue, we will simply swap in the original dell disk.
Otherwise: screw dell!

PS: Beware that Dell will no provide you with (extra) drive cages for your server (even though their website leads you down to believe otherwise and they are not actually available from Dell)

 

[Emulex]

one server runs 50 million $ of transactions through it. being down is not an option. why would you cut corners? the SAS drives have custom firmware by hp for their matching controller. Sata drives would never be considered at all even if they put a SAS board on them for dual ported full duplex action.

I've had 2 drives fail that were quality ibm or hp SAS/SCSI in the past 10 years. i've had about 15 drives generic seagate SAS/SCSI/SATA enterprise drives fail in the same time period. numbers speak for themselves; most of the drives that did not fail ran at 100% load (over 1.00 disk queue) 24x7x365 long past their MTBF. I assume the custom firmware matched to the custom san array permitted service when the drives may have failed out. Most of the IBM drives held nearly a million webhosts for roadrunner and those dudes would so punish the free bandwidth they had on their hands lol.

 

[mutz]

so what IBM does so differently?
they got 4.7Ghz (and 5.1Ghz) processors which are capable at doubling the SPECint benchmark of intels 8 core becktons, each doing 4 SMT threads per core,
8 core chip goes another 24 logical core i.e 32 cores per chip, and seems people are buying that extensively even though the prices are high,
Intel is not a 2 year company and still with all it's expertise, seems like it is being belittled by a giant like IBM,
as it is doing to AMD in the desktop market, so it is getting from IBM in the server one...

 

[bamacre]

i'd fire anyone that even suggested dell outlet for server parts lol.

that server rebootin' every other week randomly? cool we'll take it back and sell it on the outlet to some fool that won't have your luck. (aka scratch n dent)

I know someone who buys servers from their Outlet exclusively. And why shouldn't he, they have the same warranty.

 

[coolVariable]

I know someone who buys servers from their Outlet exclusively. And why shouldn't he, they have the same warranty.

Yup. But you apparently talk to people working in large corps ... people who would get fired in a small biz ("You spent WHAT on the new server???")

 

[mutz]

Dell doesn't have the IBM (nor hp) firmware on their drives either. which is fine tuned to operate with the concurrent version of the smart-array (or ibm's raid 8) as well. this firmware is upgraded every time they upgrade the raid controller firmware to make the drive more robust. It's more than TLER.

<ZIP>

But it does add up into the price. Since we all know a RE4 2TB drive is going to eat it within 5 years - probably several times if i run it over its 30-40&#37; duty cycle.

not going to happen on any sata drive you get off newegg.

that's a very good explanation..

i was thinking yesterday of all these extravagant pricing schemes lent by all these big corporations, trying to find a way to reduce both pricing and expenses,
some of these companies spend each year the same as a small country budget.

apparently customers are moving into a data-center module replacing they're need of buying new hardware each year,
paying the companies a monthly or yearly renting fee reduces costs for both the producers and the consumers.
instead of having to hire huge amount of field technicians, HW manufacturers can simply hire few, gathering all the hardware to a single place, reducing the need to pay extra hours, vehicles etc. concentrating the entire effort at a single place instead of an entire area.

this of course also reduce the cost of maintenance,
imagine a company buying one of those power 780 servers in 750,000$ and having a maintenance fee of 250,000$ for 3 years,
placing the same server at a data center and using some of it's unused resources for other companies needs, takes down the cost of both maintenance and hardware.

so resource sharing and concentrating, can reduce a lot of a company overhead,
imagine a company like IBM, DELL, HP etc. which spends each year billions over billions on services when each company it service has to spend huge amount of money separately buying they're services as well..

the same is happening with semiconductor manufacturers, moving into common foundries instead of having to support the entire manufacturing process by them selfs..!

this is quite exiting ...

 

[mutz]

yep, you are right,
as for desktop (up to 12GB should be enough) this difference isn't so relevant, though with servers, it can get pretty high,
buffered memory even takes it minimum 20$ higher.

btw, not sure about dell (though probably), IBM and HP memory can get very highly priced, in the range of hundred dollar and more for 6 or 8 GB modules (and even 4).

actually, taking another look at newegg reveals that 4GB DDR2 PC5300 ECC are less pricier then the same modules which are regular DRAM,
the cheapest are 114$ for the ECC vs 145$ for the normal.

the cheapest 4GB DDR2 800 is 116$ vs 125 for the non-ECC.

at 10600 DDR3, the cheapest is 25$ for non-ECC DRAM and 40$ for the ECC 1GB.

for 4GB (2*2) it's 82$ vs 111$ for the ECC.

141$ vs 166$ for 2*3GB

210$ vs 278$ for 2*4GB

so you were right about DDR3 yet for DDR2, the prices can be even lower..

myth?
kind of .