On Tue, Oct 26, 2010 at 09:52:51PM -0400, Edward A. Berry wrote: > Another question about computer hardware- If I configure a computer at > the Dell site, it costs about $700 to add a 2TB SATA drive. On > amazon.com or Staples or such, a 2TB drive costs ~$110. to $200 depending > on brand. > > Are the Dell-installed drives much faster
No. > or more reliable No. > or have a better warranty? No. In fact they frequently have a worse warranty than the exact same retail product with a non-Dell part number. One of the ways that Dell keeps costs down is to negotiate a bulk deal with the hard drive OEMs where they provide Dell the exact same drives they sell in the retail channel, but with a shorter warranty, typically 1 year instead of 3 or 5 years. > After all, RAID is supposed to stand for redundant array of inexpensive > disks, and we could afford a lot more redundancy at the Amazon.com price. RAID is good for performance and uptime reasons, but it is _not_ a replacement for backups. You probably knew that, but I'll mention it for the audience playing along at home. > And, are there any brands or models that should be avoided due to known > reliability issues? Not really. Seagate had some firmware issues with their first 1.5 TB models, but they were worked out fairly quickly. I think any of the major vendors are going to be fairly competitve when it comes to reliability. The important thing is to look at the drive warranty. The lower-end drives will have 3 year or shorter warranties, and the higher-end drives will have 5 year warranties. Buy a model with a 5 year warranty. -ben -- | Ben Eisenbraun | Software Sysadmin | | Structural Biology Grid | http://sbgrid.org | | Harvard Medical School | http://hms.harvard.edu |
