Can some one explain this price?

[thurstmw]

I was looking around on newegg and decided to check out what the most expensive 3.5 HDD they had was.

Turns out it is a IBM 44X2458 1TB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive. Priced at 1300 dollars.

I know that this drive is for business servers ect... but I don't understand what would make it worth 10x as much as similar drives.

Its not even SAS or 6.0gb/s sata, which I thought SAS was pretty standard for servers.

Shit you can get a 20 pack of 1tb 7200rpm Deskstars (yes in know deathstar) for the same price. But still 20 for the price of one.

How much more reliable and faster could this really be?

 

[akg5]

It could just be a legacy type deal. It's not something that people commonly need so they can charge more for it. RAMBUS memory is insanely expensive for the same reason.

 

[a little off]

Th only thing I could think of is that there might be a appliance out there that only excepts IBM 44X2458 drives. If the appliance is 40K, $1300 for a drive isn't a big deal.

 

[Blue Fox]

Firmware lockouts. If you buy a SAN or the likes from Dell, HP, IBM, etc, you won't be able to use anything but their drives as they have custom firmware on them and the units will reject anything that doesn't have the proper firmware.

 

[thurstmw]

Firmware lockouts. If you buy a SAN or the likes from Dell, HP, IBM, etc, you won't be able to use anything but their drives as they have custom firmware on them and the units will reject anything that doesn't have the proper firmware.

Oh ok thanks. Asshole companies.

 

[Hunterzyph]

They're also ensuring that if they need to support/troubleshoot the equipment, that the drives are not part of the problem. It would be impossible for them to test every single solitary drive combination, so instead they lock it out. That said, I believe that every device should have an option to 'disable warranty features' and allow you to put in anything you want...with the qualification being that you won't get help from the support vendor.