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Updating drive sleds in a G4 Xserve
Authored by: macshome on Sep 14, '04 11:38:31AM

Sure this might work with other drives, but you don't get the huge amount of testing and performance firmware tweaking that Apple puts their drives through. They reject something like ~80% of the drives sent to them for the "enterprise" products and send them back. Those drives then end up in "consumer" places like BestBuy.

Also why use psync just to make a bootable clone? You could just use the restore tab of Disk Utility or asr in the terminal. Then just pick the startup disk in the System Preferences.



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Apple Quality Control
Authored by: tetsuotheironman on Sep 14, '04 12:24:59PM

Where do you get this information from? I've been an Apple technician for quite a while, and their quality control for their products isn't necessarily 'top quailty' imho. Not knocking the brand name, but I doubt they toss %80 of the drives they test.



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Actually, that's true
Authored by: daveschroeder on Sep 14, '04 01:37:08PM

But it's not for ALL drives in all Apple products. It is ONLY for the drives in Xserve and Xserve RAID products. Yes, they're just run of the mill ATA and SATA disks, but they've been put through an extremely thorough battery of tests (more thorough that for consumer products), and many are rejected. In this way, Apple can get the benefits of the traditionally higher quality control of SCSI disks by doing the quality control itself, without the associated higher costs of SCSI.



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Apple Quality Control
Authored by: MorganizeIT on Sep 14, '04 04:10:54PM

I also have my doubts about wether the higher cost is justified by rigorous quality control. I replaced the three 60GB IBM ATA drives from my XServe G4 with 120GB Western Digital drives. The 120GB drives have been running 24/7 without a crash for about a year. The 60GB drives were moved to PowerMac workstations and so far one of them has crashed (intermittent read/write failure, SMART and surface check tests show no errors). I wish I could buy the sleds seperately, I'd be hot-swapping like a 70s car key party.



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Apple Quality Control
Authored by: plambert on Sep 14, '04 05:40:24PM

That's nice that your drives haven't had problems. But we're not talking about 33% failure rates here, where you'd expect that one of your three drives would have a problem in a year.

We're talking about very low failure rates to begin with. This only matters if you have a thousands of drives.

Sure, small customers with one or two or ten Xserves are important. But if you sell someone 1,000 servers with three drives each, then a 1% failure rate means 30 drives. That's a lot.

Yet it means you'd only have a 3% chance of a failure in your configuration. Not such a big deal for you.

It's important to remember that no matter who you are, you are not the _only_ customer Apple has. :-)



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