Branded servers and HD pricing

#Chri5#

#Chri5#

#Chri5#

Soldato
Joined
27 Feb 2003
Posts
7,276
Location
Shropshire
Just wondering what people's thoughts are on the cost of manufacturer pricing on server HDs?

Now, I appreciate a company like HP will do some testing to qualify drives to ensure compatability and the like, but some of their pricing is a bit silly. Some recent SATA drives I've had as HP parts are still branded as Western Digital RE3 drives, HP haven't even bothered to stick their own labels on them.

Here's a couple of HP parts - bog standard 7200rpm SATA, cold swap drives:

HP 2TB (507774-B21) : ~£550+VAT
HP 1TB (507772-B21) : ~£360+VAT

OEM parts:

WD RE4 2TB RAID : ~£185+VAT
WD RE3 1TB RAID : ~£95+VAT

Just how much qualification do HP do? :confused: To add insult to injury, HP only warrant entry and midline (basically anything 7.2k rpm) SATA/SAS drives for 1 year. Yet buy the much cheaper WD and you get 5 years warranty.

Do Dell and others run such crazy pricing?
 
Dells SATA drives are pretty equally shockingly marked up.

The SAS drives are very competitive though.
 
Would agree, we've just bought 15 x 2TB each costing a silly £300 each from dell, a lot of money :eek:
 
Dell pricing can be crazy.
Just recently they have got a lot better on RAM.
But the amount of times we've bought a Dell and then the RAM elsewhere....I lose count.
WIth HD's we're getting into the habbit of doing the same.
Our Account Manager is happy to sell us caddies at around £5 - £8 each, so we can save a lot by buying HD's elsewhere.

Recently we needed a server with a single SSD in - Dell wanted something in the region of £700 for a 128GB SSD!
 
I tried purchasing caddys from my dell account manager they refused ...

Also the firmware on the new raid controllers for the 11g servers refuse to work with anything but dell branded drives ... I've yet to test this myself tho
 
H200 and H700 cards don't reject non Dell drives - there was a big backlash and Dell changed this.
 
Interesting it's not HP that like to inflate commodity item prices then.

I've quickly put together an Excel matrix of common HP drives and alternatives from WD or Seagate (with a 3rd party caddy where needed).

HP actually works out cheaper on a hot plug 250GB SATA and are within £10 of a 2.5" SAS 146GB 10k. Other than those though, the cost saving in favour of OEM drive + caddy ranges from £50 to over £320.
 
ThomP said:
I tried purchasing caddys from my dell account manager they refused ...

Also the firmware on the new raid controllers for the 11g servers refuse to work with anything but dell branded drives ... I've yet to test this myself tho
Click to expand...

Hummm - they shouldn't.
We needed caddies for a new server.
Some guy on EBay was selling them for about £20 each.
Ordered some then spoke to our account manager - £15 each.
They will sell me the 3.5", 2.5" and the 3.5"-2.5" converters.
 
3rd party caddy

I realise this is an old thread. but in the hope that one of the origional posters or someone else peeks in I'd appreciate any links for people who provide 3rd party or a large range of 2nd user caddies

I've struggling to find something I can use in place of the caddies for the HP microserver

This is a classic example of large vendors ripping customers off

The entire server WITH 4 caddeis costs £240 or there abouts including 1x250gb drive and 1gb of ECC ram

But if you want an extra completely plastic drive caddy guess how much?

Theyre about £80 each

What a total rip off for something probably doesnt cost more than a couple of quid to make

The HP part number is 624879-001

The closest I could find so far is a 373211-001 which looks "similar" but the drive goes in the opposite way up

If anyone has seen a drive cage that uses caddies that look the same as this or knows of a company that makes or sells "equivalents" it would be immensely appreciated
 
ubermik said:
I realise this is an old thread. but in the hope that one of the origional posters or someone else peeks in I'd appreciate any links for people who provide 3rd party or a large range of 2nd user caddies

I've struggling to find something I can use in place of the caddies for the HP microserver

This is a classic example of large vendors ripping customers off

The entire server WITH 4 caddeis costs £240 or there abouts including 1x250gb drive and 1gb of ECC ram

But if you want an extra completely plastic drive caddy guess how much?

Theyre about £80 each

What a total rip off for something probably doesnt cost more than a couple of quid to make

The HP part number is 624879-001

The closest I could find so far is a 373211-001 which looks "similar" but the drive goes in the opposite way up

If anyone has seen a drive cage that uses caddies that look the same as this or knows of a company that makes or sells "equivalents" it would be immensely appreciated
Click to expand...

Lol, that price is disgusting, considering you can get the HP SAN caddies new on the bay for about £8-£12 each.

Problem you will have is that most of the other caddies will be SAS, but perhaps a G6 server, that has LFF drives with caddies, and no Smart Array RAID card, may fit... You would have to do a fair bit of googling though.
 
Interestingly enough I'm looking to reuse one of our Dell R610's and asked our AM about buying caddies, which he replied we cant sell them w/o hdd. So bought 6 from HK and 2 750GB SATA drives to test ;)
 
SASsy LFF?

Some of the caddys I've seen are labelled as SAS/LFF and it would be surprising if manufacturers created a whole new drive spec so I would guess the drive body is the same for all 3.5 inch drives

And most dont seem to have any interface hardware so the back (business end) of the caddy is either completely open or just seems to have a bracing bar to give the structure some rigidity but the drive itself plugs straight into tbe backplane

But obviously a caddy that is just 1 or 2mm deeper, shorter, wider, narrower or is slightly set offcentre is all that is needed to make them "incompatible" with other rack systems and thats before you even consider the locking mechanism

So really I am hoping they would assume people would treat the part numbers as gospel and might have used the same or a compatible caddy in another server but with a different part number the same way car manufacturers used to box the same spares in several boxes with different part numbers and prices for various models

But it really is in the realms of the ridiculous when 3 empty plastic caddies would cost more than the entire machine theyre for would cost with 4 of them lol

Infact it would be cheaper to completely replace the drive cage, backplane and caddies with a 3rd party one if someone ever needed to replace the caddys than it would be to just buy one or two replacements

Heck, it hasnt even got LED's on it like some of the other HP caddies have and you can pick those up for a tenner if you shop around :S

Thank heavens I had the foresight to purchase the 3 year onsite warranty for this thing otherwise it'd be cheaper to throw it away and buy another one rather than replace a blanking plate or god forbid a sata cable died lol

Worst case I suppose I could get the "similar" one second hand then take all the extra bits off and have a go at drilling some holes on the correct side if I feel daring but I'll save that as a last resort :)
 
Actually the similar one I posted is for a G6 I think, they look VERY similar, but the drive would have the circuit board facing the wrong way hence having to drill holes

I've seen second hand ones of those floating around under a tenner so if all else fails I will have to drop into blue peter mode, I'm just waiting for the washing up liquid bottle to be empty.......... ;)
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom