Kyle McDonald wrote:
> It maybe true that you've had a drive that failed quickly. That's not > what MTBF means. The M is for 'Mean' or 'Average'. Just because some > still fail early doesn't mean that the parts, processes, testing etc. > that go into the model you pay more for don't (on average) last longer. > If you really beleive that Sun is lying when they publish specs that are > higher than for other drives, why would you trust them on other things? > Ditto with memory. Memory, CPU, and ASIC vendors are known to test the > chips that come off the assembly line, and label them with different > part numbers, speeds, or other characteristics. Likewise Micron and > the like charge more for the chips that test better. > > If Sun was charging more, and claiming they were better, but the specs > were actually the same, then I'd agree with you. But to the best of my > knowledge the specs are higher. > Part of the problem is that Sun doesn't necessarily publish the specs of the those higher performance components. To give an example, when the Thumper came out there was concern over the fact that it had a large number of SATA drives and SATA drives had a reputation for low MTBF. To make the Thumper viable, Sun required better MTBF than was common in SATA drives at the time. The manufacturer was able to provide drives at the higher spec for a premium price. Then people looked at the capacity and make of the drives and said, "Hey! Sun is ripping us off, they charge $X for this drive, but you can buy for $Y directly!" when $X was essentially what the drive cost Sun. Same goes for memory. I have had to debug hardware issues in Sun systems that turned out to be 3rd party memory. The memory was from a large memory manufacturer (I won't name names) that you have all heard of, that claimed 100% compatibility with Sun memory, but with the memory installed the network interface card(!) misbehaved, but it all worked fine with Sun memory. Turned out that there was a particular electronic characteristic that didn't matter in white-box PC's but was spec'ed on the Sun memory that the 3rd party memory didn't meet, but they didn't even know to test. I am not saying that there isn't a big markup, I am not in a position to know. I am saying that it isn't nearly as large as people make out. Look at the range of costs in what at first glance appear to be nearly identical PC's. You can get a PC at $400 and $2000 that look the same in the published specs, but the devil is in the details, and those details are often unpublished. -- blu There are two rules in life: Rule 1- Don't tell people everything you know ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Brian Utterback - Solaris RPE, Sun Microsystems, Inc. Ph:877-259-7345, Em:brian.utterback-at-ess-you-enn-dot-kom _______________________________________________ opensolaris-discuss mailing list [email protected]
