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YeOldeStonecat
[H]F Junkie
- Joined
- Jul 19, 2004
- Messages
- 11,330
If you want to talk about something objective, like Dell overnights drives on warranty for free, longer warranties, just general support...that is worth some people's money. The drives still use the same technology inside. There is so much in the enterprise world that is clearly price-gouged. Hard drives is one of them. Server chassis are another. They have high prices because they've learned that anything is priceless to the latest wasteful business model anymore. If it costs more, it must be necessary
Now tell me..what is this ...this.."price gouging" you're talking about?
Are enterprise drives generally more costly than their mid ranged 3 year desktop counterparts? Yes.
Are those 3 year mid ranged desktop drives more expensive than the white box OEM 1 year el cheapo drives? Yes!
You get what you pay for.
Now the terms I used before...describing some internal parts of the drives, if they confused you, Google is your friend. But part of what business owners like, is some form of accountability, promise, warranty, something that stands behind a product. If the majority of a businesses livelyhood lives on a server..and needs constant access...aka "reliability"..you want to build that server with parts that are expected to be as problem free for a long period of time as can be. These apparently confusing thing called a "warranty" is part of that experience. There is also a measuring tool to quantify the length of life of a hard drive..called "MTBF"...you may want to look up how manufacturers come up with these ratings. It's based on how well similar drives, or drives before this model, that had the same components..faired in the real world. They look at all the components inside of the drives. There are a lot of different parts. Production batches. Parts of varying quality..some cheap, some midrange, some heavier duty and higher priced.
When you see an MTBF rating of say, 600,000 hours (a typical mid-ranged 3 year hard drive rating)...that doesn't mean the hard drive is expected to last running for 600,000 hours. (a little over 68 years). They can't test of drive for that long of a time, right? So they test a large batch of them, like 1,000 of them. They run the large batch test for say, 1,000 hours. And count how many of those 1,000 drives failed during that test. The MTBF rating is an accumulation of success of the remaining drives.
If one drive out of the batch that ran for 600,000 hours...one failure out of about 68 is the expected failure rate.
It gives you an approximate rating to compare this family of drives against others with.
As for getting to the nitty gritty of comparing parts and components used....would you be able to follow if I illustrated the difference between a Ford F-150 pickup or GMC 1500 series or RAM 1500 series...against the 350/3500/3500 counterparts...if you were to lease a fleet of trucks for a 5 year project at a big construction site that put them under heavy usage for 24x7x365?
