Going Deep Inside Xserve Apple Drive Modules 243
adamengst writes "If you've had an Xserve drive fail, you may have considered saving some money by putting a replacement drive inside its Apple Drive Module. That may be a false economy, though. TidBITS explains why, while pinning Apple down on exactly what goes into Apple Drive Modules and why they cost so much more than bare retail drives."
Here we go again (Score:2, Insightful)
Is this like how SCSI drives have special pixie dust on the platters that ATA drives don't, and that makes them more "enterprise-y"?
Nothing to see here (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, and the 'sleds' that hold the HDs have some LEDs (cool!) and a controller board to work with the cooling system.
Like pretty much every other half decent server then.
Because Apple says so? (Score:3, Insightful)
They don't make an effort to verify this information at all. Because Xserves won't run with commodity drives, they can't do a proper comparison to determine how much is truth and how much is smoke-up-the-ass from Apple. This is such an astroturf article, it doesn't even pretend to be anything otherwise.
Re:Article text (Score:5, Insightful)
That ain't no 3rd-party article, it's an Apple sales brochure.
Disgusting.
Re:Nothing to see here (Score:4, Insightful)
Except that in this case, every other manufacturer does the same. A port of the higher price also goes in refinancing the warranty that's port of the server.
Oh, and don't think other vendor-lock in platforms don't do the same. IBM prices System x hard drives and POWER hard drives vastly different, even if they may contain the same harddrive but with a different firmware and hotplug case.
First paragraph sums it all up... (Score:5, Insightful)
... nicely. Quoting TFA - "About a year ago, we bought an Intel-based Xserve with a pair of 80 GB SATA drives to act as our primary Web server. When the boot drive went flaky on us in October 2008, ... "
Welcome to pragmatism and reality - Drives fail all the times. So use cheaper drives in redundant mode, replace them with cheaper drives when they fail. You would have saved good amount of money even if the cheaper drives failed three time more than the costlier ones. (450$ for 1TB vs $100 for 1TB - from the same article.)
Having worked in the disk mines... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Since they are slashdotted already . . . (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Article text (Score:5, Insightful)
The reason Apple (and every other server vendor) charges that much for drives is because that's what they want to do, and it's disingenuous for this guy to be spinning it as if Apple has something special in that regard.
Re:First paragraph sums it all up... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Here we go again (Score:1, Insightful)
From the article you linked to:
That's a description of a bathtub curve. How about actually reading your link before posting it next time?
Re:Ok, some good info. (Score:1, Insightful)
The windowserver doesn't take any CPU cycles when it's not in use.
Many people run headless Mac OS X systems and they're OK.
Lots of people don't know how to tune apache+whatever database in order to handle slashdot-type loads (hint: the defaults don't work).
Worthless Article by a Wannabe Admin. (Score:5, Insightful)
This retarded fluff piece aside, the reason people buy (and pay a premium) for oem "blessed" hard drive replacements is because they JUST FUCKING WORK. If I save $100 on a hard drive, but spend two hours dicking with the raid controller to get it to play nice, or find out that it is in fact 2 mb smaller then the other drives, and now the raid won't rebuild, or has some firmware issue that I now need to rig up something to update, etc. I've lost money.
There is value in having everything already tested, and all your equipment in a "supported" configuration. When you have problems it makes it that much easier.
The fact that this article was apparently written by someone who does not know the difference between SAS and SATA makes it completely worthless. Clearly they are not qualified to admin the server they do have, much less write articles about the technical benefits of apple drives over other replacements.
Its simple. (Score:3, Insightful)
Guys drives dies in Apple server hardware.
Guy looks into buying retail drive for replacement.
Guy asks forum members for advice and decides to call Apple
Guy calls Apple wanting to know why their drives ar 4x+ the cost of retail
Apple gives Guy song and dance about magical marketing BS
Guy falls for BS and tells everyone else to follow magical marketing BS
Honestly what did he expect to learn by calling Apple? Call any manufacturer, tell them you want to use cheaper 3rd part parts instead of their overpriced parts and be prepared for a load of horse shit to flow from the phone. I worked in the IT department of my college for an elective credit way back when. The head IT guy almost never bought OEM stuff if their was a cheaper retail part that would do the job. He insisted its just a 3rd party part with company logo stuck on it sold at a 3-5x mark up. He would rather used the money he saved for better things like new equipment or upgrades. Never had any problems.
Re:Worthless Article by a Wannabe Admin. (Score:3, Insightful)
If you read the article, this was one of the author's points: He had gone into this thinking like a consumer, and realized that thinking like a consumer isn't enough when you're talking about high availability/high throughput systems.
The article may be worthless to you because you may have an admin background, but I know of a lot of so called "admins" who don't understand some of these basics, as well as a lot of developer types.
Exactly the kind of articles IT people DON'T need (Score:4, Insightful)
The people who write these articles are stupid and contribute stupidity to IT in general.
1) Apple calls these beefier models "server-class" drives; you may also see terms like "RAID edition"
There is simply no data to back this up. The vendors themselves do NOT do sufficient testing to make these claims ergo Apple can not make these claims. This parallels the so-called better failure rates of SCSI/FC 'enterprise' drives and consumer SATA drives. In the FAST paper by Schroeder [usenix.org] we see the following quote.
". . . we observe little difference in replacement rates between SCSI, FC and SATA drives, . . . ."
2) Firmware - the closest thing to an argument here is "may prevent Server Monitor from being able to report on the drive's health"
3) Carrier - "Apple also told me that the rubber grommets that hold the drive to the ADM carrier are chosen specifically to match each drive's vibrational characteristics."
This leaves out the most important thing. "So what" - ok if the drives vibrational characteristics are not matched what happens. Is it significant? Where is the data to say so?
4) Extensive testing - Essentially arguing that Apple does burn-in testing (which you could easily do yourself) however...again from the FAST paper:
"Contrary to common and proposed models, hard drive replacement rates do not enter steady state after the first year of operation. Instead replacement rates seem to steadily increase over time."
Drives act like mechanical devices NOT electronic devices.
In general - have you EVER read an article with so many "may"'s and "possibly"'s? There's very little here that could be risk assessed (giving some kind of probability of some consequence) - which means it USELESS as advice. The parts that actually IMPLY some kind of probability/consequence are not well supported by the studies with the largest sample sizes.
Re:Worthless Article by a Wannabe Admin. (Score:3, Insightful)
I read it, and that's what made me conclude it was a waste of time. If you are an amateur, what good does listening to another amateur read off lines from Apple's PR sheet do you? That's what he did. All the reasons are pretty much prefaced with "Apple said". If you asked Dell why their hard drives have a markup they'd tell you the same line of BS. Last I saw the tagline for the site was "News for Nerds" not "Regurgitate PR crap without question". Now if he had replaced some Xserve drives with aftermarket drives, and tested them against the official Apple ones, that would be both relevant and interesting. Hell if he had bought one, taken it apart, and posted an analysis of what goes in to making one (from the brand of HD used, the quality of the carrier, etc. That would be interesting. To send Apple an e-mail asking them "Hey why should I pay you extra money to buy your official hard drives over the Newegg daily deal" and copy and paste their response is a waste of everyone's time. I read the article because the story title "Going Deep Inside Xserve Apple Drive Modules" led me to believe that there might actually be something unique about them, and the article would actually look at what's inside.
Re:Article text (Score:5, Insightful)
It's really NOT that informative.
Informative:
Yes. You can use off the shelf SATA drives in your ADMs. They will work just fine, and any special firmware tweaks Apple has done in the drive firmware are completely unnoticeable in any real world environment, if they're there at all.
I've replaced 500GB SATA drives in ADMs with 1TB off the shelf "consumer grade" Seagate drives. They work flawlessly, with no performance penalty. I'd trust them EXACTLY as much as I would Apple-supplied drives - which is to say, not at all without RAID mirroring and a good backup. ALL hard drives fail.
Not Informative:
The article. They didn't do anything but trust what some low-level Apple rep gave them. They did NO actual testing, the whole thing is purely anecdotal.
Re:Article text (Score:4, Insightful)