Dell server, Why are Sata drives so expensive

whatstherush

Hi all,

Looking to buy a dell server, but the price of the Sata drives included with them seem very expensive. A 1 TB 7200 drive is coming in at €320, which seems to be about 3 times the cost of a desktop Sata .
I know these Enterprise drives are more reliable than your run of the mill desktop drives and would cost more but I wouldn't have thought it would bump it up that much. Also the drives are hot pluggable, again I would imagine this would increase cost but not by this much.

I suppose the question I would ask is €320 the going rate for for 1 TB Enterprise class hot pluggable drive.
Plus are there two classes of Sata drives, one's that are hot pluggable one's that are not.

Here's a link to the particular server I was looking at
http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=sv4r415&c=ie&l=en&s=bsd&cs=iebsdt1&model_id=poweredge-r415

Thanks in advance

bhickey

In my opinion, Dell have always taken the piss when it comes to RAM & hard disk pricing in their servers. The base model prices are always tempting but the extras really add up.

The exact models of drives that Dell install can sometimes be got online for not much more than 50% of the Dell cost. So if you're on a budget and aren't feeling the love from your Dell account manager, get the server with as little RAM and the smallest cheapest drive that you can and then go and the find the rest elsewhere.

Tomtata

+1 bhickey

Saved €2000 recently by providing my own 600GB SAS drives and caddies.
Dell are a rip off for drives - I think the only advantage is a custom firmware that writes events to the onboard DRAC or BIOS.

Its doesnt warrent the extra cost!