6/20 I have an MSA20 (a scsi attached raid enclosure) from HP that uses
SATA disks. My company is somewhat cheap and I'd like to keep an extra
disk on hand, but not pay for the nifty drive carrier. (this way when
a drive fails, I can just remove it, swap out the disk in the carrier
and slap it back in without waiting for shipping). BUT, when I tested
this it didn't work. The drives are the exact same model, but there is
some HP specific printing on the label (and a 4 letter, comma separated
code, which is different). I have used dd to insure that the disks are
have the same bits, but no joy, any of you know what it is that makes
the HP disk different? -crebbs
\_ firmware
\_ ah the joy of vendor lock-in
\_ I'm not sure how using HP saves your company money. There are tons
of cheapy scsi attached raid boxes out there which will happily
take any same sized disk to replace a bad drive.
\_ HP isn't saving the company money. The product needs to run
on HP.
\_ No reason to be tied to HP for storage. Fine, buy HP for
the CPU, but detach CPU/computation from storage wrt vendors
\_ You buy HP for the support, and when you buy large, their
discounts are deep. Also, doesn't apply to the MSA, but
their EVAs are pretty freakin cool.
\_ EVAs are likely way out of the price range for crebbs
company. If they won't buy the right disks they won't
buy an EVA. And yes they're pretty cool. At least as
cool as storage can be, anyway.
\_ Why would I want an EVA instead of, say, a Netapp?
\_ There's nothing wrong with a Netapp, per se. Its
just that the EVA is 'better'. I like the EVA
architecture better. Virtual-virtual disks
across the whole array with no hot spares doing
nothing, the control software is more mature
although it does run from a windows box. In
general the EVA is just a more mature and serious
product than the Netapp. I've used the Netapp
since before they were anyone. The EVA is new to
me but I prefer it overall. Of course the EVA
will cost a lot more in $/tb but there's a certain
amount of "get what you pay for" if you can afford
it. What I don't like about the Netapp is the
very patchy way it has developed over time. New
features get jacked in, some hardware level
maintenance requires on-site hands but really
shouldn't, half the tech problems can be handled
by shutting down all the shelves (via big red
switch) and powering back up *and not in any
other way*. I wouldn't use Netapp for front line
real time 24/7 storage if I could afford better.
\_ It may not be HP issue, but the drive manufacturer issue. I've had
numerous cases where the drives of identical model actually had
slightly different size(usually by few thousand blocks.) And if it
turns out the new drive has smaller # of blocks than the rest of the
drives, that may be why. |