On 2/3/2011 1:52 PM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
> Les Mikesell wrote:
>> On 2/3/2011 12:38 PM, Chuck Munro wrote:
>>>
>>> Less than $500 for a Supermicro box? Holy crap, Batman!
>>>
>>> I'm using one of their motherboards (X8DAL-3) in a home-brew
>>> configuration, which has turned out to be somewhat less expensive than a
>>> factory-built Supermicro, but still not cheap. I'll say one thing for
> <snip>>
>> If you are building your own stuff, I kind of like trayless hot-swap
>> sata bays. And if you care more about size and power than speed and
>> capacity, you can get them for laptop size drives too.
>
> Trayless is nice. All the sleds mostly use *different* screws. The ones
> that drive me crazy are the Penguin boxes we have, that use screws no one
> else uses... *and* we have a good number that came with only one or two
> drives (for use in clusters)....

It has been a while since I used Penguins, but as I recall they used to
ship a bag of those screws with every unit, so if you don't have them it
may be because you threw them out. And they put working carriers in
the bays. The ones that irritate me are the IBMs and Dells that ship
dummy carriers that take just as much material in the empty bays and
charge a bundle for working ones if you add drives later.

--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@gmail.com


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Les Mikesell wrote:
> On 2/3/2011 1:52 PM, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
<snip>
>> Trayless is nice. All the sleds mostly use *different* screws. The ones
>> that drive me crazy are the Penguin boxes we have, that use screws no
>> one else uses... *and* we have a good number that came with only one or
two
>> drives (for use in clusters)....
>
> It has been a while since I used Penguins, but as I recall they used to
> ship a bag of those screws with every unit, so if you don't have them it
> may be because you threw them out. And they put working carriers in

Don't look at me, they've were here when I started. And the other admin I
work with claims they came without. I dunno, maybe the guy I replaced, or
the one he replaced....

> the bays. The ones that irritate me are the IBMs and Dells that ship
> dummy carriers that take just as much material in the empty bays and
> charge a bundle for working ones if you add drives later.

Oh, that silliness. What I dislike are the PERC 700s, that will *only*
accept Dell drives, not commodity ones.

mark

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On Thu, 3 Feb 2011, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:

> Oh, that silliness. What I dislike are the PERC 700s, that will *only*
> accept Dell drives, not commodity ones.

My understanding is that Dell has reversed this policy via a firmware
update after a flood of complaints. I don't have any 700's to check this,
but I believe they will now accept non-Dell drives. Certainly the Perc 5's
and 6's do.

Steve
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On 02/03/11 1:57 PM, Steve Thompson wrote:
> On Thu, 3 Feb 2011, m.roth@5-cent.us wrote:
>
>> Oh, that silliness. What I dislike are the PERC 700s, that will *only*
>> accept Dell drives, not commodity ones.
> My understanding is that Dell has reversed this policy via a firmware
> update after a flood of complaints. I don't have any 700's to check this,
> but I believe they will now accept non-Dell drives. Certainly the Perc 5's
> and 6's do.

the complication being that random off-the-shelf drives probably haven't
been qualified with the raid controller, and have the potential for any
number of nasty side effects. even simple firmware revision changes
on the same model drive can break things, relating to write barriers and
buffer flushing.

this is especially problematic for SATA drives, where the majority of
them are optimized for desktop single user performance and take all
kinda shortcuts that would adversely affect data reliability in a raid
environment.


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