I am currently looking a building a server, and am comparing hardware. In particular I have been looking at hard drives. It seems like hotswap hard drives are significantly more expensive than normal hard drives
I know the advantage of hotswap is that you can replace hard drives without turning off the machine, but I was surprised that the price difference is $200.
Is this just the way things are, or am I missing something?
Best Answer
They charge this b/c they can. People who are worried about hot swapping tend to have a business need/reason behind that. Either from a risk or cost point of view but in many cases it's both.
Say it's 9am and a drive in a RAID 1 running the companies email server dies. Do you shut it down and replace the drive which now leaves 200 employee unable to finish going through their email in the morning. Do you wait until after business hours to do this hoping that the other drive doesn't die during the day? Also what happens when the remaining working drive spins down...will it spin back up and work or will it die too? All of these risks are avoided or at least reduced with hot swap equipment. And the vendors charge you for this.
Also when you have a failed drive and need to hot swap a drive is not the time you want to find out if it's going to work or not. So call the difference in price an insurance policy.
In the case of high end storage as MrDenny points out NetAPP and EMC drives are pretty much highway robbery...but these drives often have vendor specific firmware and have been put through a number of tests to make sure that the drive won't have an early death.