Third Party Drive in Apple Drive Module?

S

simon1663

Registered
Hi,
I have got a xserve with 80gig HDD's in it. I want to upgrade the drives to 400GB ones. The Apple drive module for 400GB is really expensive. I was thinking of buying third party 400GB drives (50% off) and unscrewing the exisitng drives; just screwing the new hdds into the drive module.

I am not sure about
1. Will it work at all? Will OS X firmwire recognize third party HDDs. Say Western Digital ones.

2. Whether they will work in the existing PCI RAID card? Obviously I will reconfigure everything from scratch..


AND , has anyone tried it?

Many Thanks.
Simon
 
It'll work. The drives are not proprietary in the Xserve. They are, however, premium quality drives that are thoroughly tested to have not a single flaw, since they're for the server platform.

It's kind of like buying an expensive sports car and then filling it up with regular and leaving the spare tire on it. :)

Do you have a sales rep? Most folks I've worked with in education or in enterprise get those drives at a nice discount from their Apple reps.
 
Go3iverson said:
It'll work. The drives are not proprietary in the Xserve. They are, however, premium quality drives that are thoroughly tested to have not a single flaw, since they're for the server platform.

It's kind of like buying an expensive sports car and then filling it up with regular and leaving the spare tire on it. :)

Do you have a sales rep? Most folks I've worked with in education or in enterprise get those drives at a nice discount from their Apple reps.
Click to expand...

Testing could be improved as I had a bad drive in my 3 month old xserve and it took apple about 3-4 weeks to replace.


Kees
 
Thanks for the reply.

I can buy drives at wholesale price which is one-fifth the price of what apple would sell them for.

It's just a matter of unscrewing the old drive from the drive module and screwing the new ones in..
 
simon1663 said:
Thanks for the reply.

I can buy drives at wholesale price which is one-fifth the price of what apple would sell them for.

It's just a matter of unscrewing the old drive from the drive module and screwing the new ones in..
Click to expand...

I replace the 80gb with a hitachi 400gb and it worked oke. The system recognised it instantly and i also can boot the harddrive.

So save yourself some money and replace the original with a third party drive.


Good Luck, kees
 
I have just done this in a Xserve G5
I used Hitachi 500Gb drives in a RAID1 mirror and 3rd drive a s snapshot
All went well apart from-
Read write activity lights on front of drive sleds do not work
If the RAID 1 mirror is broken/degraded you cannot hotswop drive and re-add to RAID, you have to reboot the server first, this does not happen with the apple drives
I am only doing this until Apple finally release the G5 Xserve 500Gb modules.
 
edadams said:
I have just done this in a Xserve G5
I used Hitachi 500Gb drives in a RAID1 mirror and 3rd drive a s snapshot
All went well apart from-
Read write activity lights on front of drive sleds do not work
If the RAID 1 mirror is broken/degraded you cannot hotswop drive and re-add to RAID, you have to reboot the server first, this does not happen with the apple drives
I am only doing this until Apple finally release the G5 Xserve 500Gb modules.
Click to expand...

How did you get the brackets or did you have some spare ?


Thx, Kees
 
Kees Buijs said:
How did you get the brackets or did you have some spare ?


Thx, Kees
Click to expand...

I have about 35 spare 80Gb sleds lying around from the XServe's we have installed over the past year and a half.

Ed
 
Kees Buijs said:
Testing could be improved as I had a bad drive in my 3 month old xserve and it took apple about 3-4 weeks to replace.


Kees
Click to expand...


Where are you located? That seems to be an exceptional amount of time from my experiences.

BTW, if you have a spare parts kit, I believe Apple just sends you a replacement part through that as well (i.e. use the spare drive, stay up and running, call it in to Apple, exchange for a new drive), so that would be the ideal way to stay 24x7. On the other hand, I don't know how server support starts if you are not using the apple supplied parts. Obviously, Enterprise support is much different than consumer, but usually the first step in the troubleshooting methodology is to put the affected unit back to a known config, i.e. all apple shipped parts.
 
Go3iverson said:
Where are you located? That seems to be an exceptional amount of time from my experiences.

BTW, if you have a spare parts kit, I believe Apple just sends you a replacement part through that as well (i.e. use the spare drive, stay up and running, call it in to Apple, exchange for a new drive), so that would be the ideal way to stay 24x7. On the other hand, I don't know how server support starts if you are not using the apple supplied parts. Obviously, Enterprise support is much different than consumer, but usually the first step in the troubleshooting methodology is to put the affected unit back to a known config, i.e. all apple shipped parts.
Click to expand...

We don't reccomend our customer purchase spare parts kits. We keep on on hand at all time for our customers with Xserves and also make sure that the Apple Retail stores we work with keep one on hand for our customers to whom they sell Xserves. This way, we make sure than all of our customers never have a spare parts kit more than an hour away and that they don't have to spend the extra cash to have a kit they will likely never use on hand.
We also do the same for our education customers and encourage the System Administrators we train to do the same.
 
sourcehound said:
We also do the same for our education customers and encourage the System Administrators we train to do the same.
Click to expand...

I am from europe and apple does not seem to care to much about its customers overthere.

Also the problem was diagnosed myself correctly (bad drive), but had to go through to an authorised repair center, which required a week to confirm my diangose. After that according to them, it required some weeks to have apple send them a replacement.

I find a spare kit to expansive, and the macmini i used as a replacement (which also was bad out of the box) worked fine.

Happily the bad drive was not so bad it could not retrieve all stuff from it.


Still i will buy apple stuff despite my bad expirences with the systems they sold me (i certainly will not rely on ms for my business essentials (although we sell a lot of parts and ms-pc's for a living).


Kees
 
edadams said:
I have about 35 spare 80Gb sleds lying around from the XServe's we have installed over the past year and a half.

Ed
Click to expand...

Do you sell those ? I would like to have a few if SATA.


Kees
 
Kees Buijs said:
Do you sell those ? I would like to have a few if SATA.


Kees
Click to expand...

No we dont sell them

I only have about 3 drive sleds that do not have drives in them

The rest are used for R&D, disk images, training, etc

I know the sleds are in demand (US$130 on eBay), the sleds I have are all from G5 Xserve's

I have replaced the 3rd party 500GB drives in question and I am much happier, Apple have finally released the G5 xserve 500Gb drives.

Ed
 
Hello

I thought it was a wast to simply throw out such a good Apple SATA Drive. I wanted to put it into my PC at home. Coulden't get it to work. It just sat there and didn't really spin up much or anything. Is there something that needs to be done to allow these drives to run in PC's. Has anyone ever tried running one in a PC?? Can they be used in a PC??

Thanks
 
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