From: jason kappy (jasonkappy@yahoo.com)
Date: Mon May 22 2006 - 08:37:06 EDT
I received many replies and thanks to everyone who replied. Bottom line, don't use disks from other vendors unless you cannot afford. SUN uses a specific firmware and also has stringent power, heat disspation etc... requirements for the disks used in StoreEdge 3000 series RAID arrays. You can take a chance with JBOD. Below are emails with some specifics:
________________________________________________________________
If the array fails, and Sun believe that the 3rd party disks caused it
to fail, then they
won't replace whatever blew in the array.
E.g. if a power supply goes, Sun could say that this was caused by the
disks not drawing
power in a "supported" way, and therefore charge you call out time as
well as not actually
fixing it (or charging you for the repair).
________________________________________________________________
(1) support. if you buy a sun disk it is automatically covered under
the
support agreement for what ever device you install it in. if the price
of the over-the-counter disk is substantially cheaper then it may sound
like a good plan to buy over-the-counter and use a little of your
savings to purchase some cold spares.
the other component of this catch is situations where you need your
replacement disk to have the same geometry. even within sun OEM disks
you will see different models from different manufacturers with the
same
capacity but different geometry (i.e. cylinder count and bytes per
cylinder). this affects people who are using various RAID products
(both
software and hardware) but can also come in to play in other
situations.
if your disk is covered by a sun support agreement you can tell them
the
make/model you have and they will replace it where as going to fry's to
buy another 73GB disk will almost certainly land you a mismatch.
(2) sun has much stricter performance and thermal margins. while this
sounds trivial a higher error rate in a component like a HDD or RAM can
make a huge performance and stability difference.
i'm sure there are people who have had good luck with over-the-counter
parts but these two issues generally lead me to this conclusion: if you
can afford the sun branded gear then buy it... you get what you pay
for.
_________________________________________________________
I've always avoided putting non-Sun disks in Sun arrays that have a
controller, such as a T3, 3310, 3510, etc. these devices sometimes need
a
drive firmware upgrade to fix a problem or provide compatibility with a
controller feature. This just happened recently on a couple of 3310s I
manage.
Non-Sun drives won't take a Sun drive FW upgrade, even if it is the
exact
same model.
Save the non-Sun drives for JBOD housings or even boot disks. I do that
all
the time without problems.
_____________________________________________________________
Thanks,
J.
> Hi All,
> I want to upgrade our StorEdge 3310 array from 10,000 RPM
76GB SCSI disks to 10,000RPM 300GB. The price of buying disks directly
from SUN is twice than if I buy the disks from ebay or some place,
attach the caddy's pulled out of old disks and slap them back in. Is there
any catch in doing this? I am not concerned about SUN not replacing
failed disks.
---------------------------------
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