[mythtv-users] How is this pricing possible?

[Simon Hobson]

Raymond Wagner wrote:

>  > Once you accept that your drives will fail, and will fail early... you
>>  will make proper arrangements for it... and then it won't bother you
>>  when the inevitable happens.  Just buy the drives with the longest
>>  warranty, and expect to use it.
>
>What for?  When you're buying large amounts of hard drives, there's no
>such thing as 'good enough', merely 'good enough for now'.  What much
>worth is a five-year warranty?  What are you going to be using that
>drive for five years from now?  Five years ago, 500GB drives were the
>biggest things out there.  300 and 320GB drives were the sweet spot
>around $100-$120 per drive.  A 300GB drive will get you maybe 40 hours
>of recording, or 10 movies.  It's not worth the port on the controller.

There is another issue - we are now to the point where buying 
replacement drives for some of our servers is getting difficult - or 
at least less trivial than it was. Many of our drives are still SCSI 
(80 pin SCA) and even if we don't care about capacity (a large drive 
will hold a small amount of data without difficulty), SCSI drives are 
rapidly being dropped from suppliers inventories. We certainly don't 
let a server get retired without salvaging it's drives.

If a drive is still under warranty then it's the supplier's problem 
to find a new drive, not ours :)

Unlike a typical PC with cables where it's easy to switch interface 
type (or add a controller to mix-n-match), with most server grade 
hardware, it's just not practical when the drive interfaces directly 
with a backplane so there are no cables.

-- 
Simon Hobson

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