Since the top of the line 7200 RPM 9 MS hard drive costs only $3-$5 more than the 5400 RPM 12 MS hard drive that RackShack uses, and since the hard drive is often the weakest link, any chance RackShack could be talked into offering faster hard drives in their whitebox servers, esp. the AMD XP1700?

Yes I agree. I would feel better having a faster drive in my box. I would also pay extra if you could offer 10,000 RPM drives as an upgrade. ;) ;)

Going to 10K (or even 15K while we're at it) means going to SCSI which means +$200 for a quality SCSI card or a motherboard with onboard SCSI, plus another +~$200 to go from an IDE hard drive to a SCSI drive. So that would be a big jump.

But going from a 5400 to a 7200 RPM drive would only add $3 - $5 if I were to buy both from Pricewatch. I don't know what kind of deal RackShack is getting, but I'm guessing they could find an equally good deal on 7200 RPM drives for no more than $10 additional in a worst case. That I would gladly pay, especially if the setup simply went from $349 to $359. A 25% reduction in seek time seems like a significant improvement for a web server when t he cost is less than $10.

faster faster and faster

The nature of a webserver means that lots of disk i/o occurs, so a 7.2k rpm drive is definately worth it.

Regards
Matt

The server recommended (storagereview.com) d740x drives are cheap.

Rackshack is so big, they could easily order direct from Maxtor/Quantum themselves, at prices even lower than we see from the shadiest places on pricewatch.com.

There's no excuse not to use the best drive for the buck in this case. A slow drive will drag down an otherwise well spec'd server. If it's their supply chain that caused them to make the poor decision to use 5400rpm drives, they really need to fire that supply chain. There are better suppliers out there who won't compromise their business.

Originally posted by panopticon
Going to 10K (or even 15K while we're at it) means going to SCSI which means +$200 for a quality SCSI card or a

No... they make 10,000 rpm IDE drives. Maxtor for one does.

rastoma - are you sure?

I don't see any 10k IDE drives on the Maxtor site and you would think if they released them there would be a big banner up front stating the achievement... or am I looking right at it and not seeing it?

SCSI costs more than IDE not only because of the speed (ie 10k and 15K) but also because it is multi-access where as IDE is single. If you ever download a few large files on high speed connections to an IDE drive youll understand what I mean as your mahcine slows down, way down, where as scsi barely slows.

As for the issue at hand, Im sure they get 5400 rpm drives far cheaper than we see them for on pricewatch because of volume and so forth but even then, Id pay another 15 or 20 a month for the far superior drive, it really does make a differance.

Originally posted by TedS
SCSI costs more than IDE not only because of the speed (ie 10k and 15K) but also because it is multi-access where as IDE is single. ...


While that used to be true, the new IDE specs allow for tagged and queued i/o, just like SCSI.

A new 7200 RPM Western Digital 8.9 MS drive costs less than $80 retail, and I'm guessing that they could get them for less than $50 in volume. Revising what I said above, I would gladly pay them the whole $50, that is $400 setup instead of $350 setup, for the faster better drive.

I'm not sure if this is a misplaced post that was supposed to be an email to HeadSurfer directly, or maybe posted to their forums? *Please* don't post threads directed at one person only. We all have to read it, *please* contact them directly.