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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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