EMC hikes drive prices, blames Thai flood tragedy El Reg has been sent a copy of a letter from EMC to its Velocity channel partners saying disk drive prices will rise 5 to 15 per cent from 1 January, 2012. It is apparent the price rise is due to drive shortages caused by the Thailand flooding. This has caused retail drive prices to rise and impacted many disk drive OEM deals …
Given that EMC already charge five times the cost of the disk anyway, what's another 15 percent on top? A friend was quoted £1000 for a 2GB replacement disk, which is just a standard WD RE4 drive in a caddy. Oddly enough the EMC representative he spoke to could't explain the difference in cost. Testing or something. It's one of the reasons that we never even entertained the idea of going with EMC when we recently replaced our storage arrays.
I second J.T's comments, EMC as with almost every other major array vendor do not use the same bog standard hard drives used in desktops.
Most enterprise array vendors use specially qualifed disks designed for 24/7 operation (vs desktops 9-5) often with several major differences including:
*520-bytes/sector vs 512 for desktop
*Time limited Error Recovery vs not
*End to End ECC vs desktop with often only write ECC
*Bit Error Rate (risk of data coruption) of <1 in 10^15 (for NL-SAS or NL-SATA) vs < 1 in 10^14 for desktop
*Higher Rotational Vibration tollerance designed for multiple drives vs limited RV for desktop
*Interposer cards and special "caddies" to further reduce vibrations
*Dual-Processors and Dual Ports (sometimes on the interposer card) for redundant path access vs single for desktop.
*FC or SAS interfaces (and sometimes SATA with expensive FC or SAS interposers) vs just SATA for the desktop.
*Extensive batch testing and qualification of drives
*Often the drives have screws at both ends of the spindle vs desktop's single
The list of differences is endless, but the result is the same, EMC as with almost every other vendor uses different disks to those used for desktops.
EMC's financial year ends ... on December 31st!
Just a tiny incentive to complete contracts early and boost sales and earnings for the fiscal year methinks. Do they think buyers are stupid - you can nearly always drive a bargain at the end of the year. In my old company are real financial year ended around the 37th of September!!!
Psiren: As an EMC customer yes the kit is expensive but it's also very good. Would your "normal" disk in a caddy dial home if it fails, get an engineer on site to replace it 24*7*365 etc automatically?
Field Marshal: Supply and demand? Less supply = increased cost.
Until supplies resume (which are just beginning but who knows about the first batches off a dried out piece of machinary, I think prices will remain higher than the oversupply that probably caused the price drops a few months ago......
Companies should not accept this and look out for other ways to increase storage efficiency and storage utilization. There are really great technologies out there that can make you more independent from buying more and more storage like dedupe, thin provisioning, NFO (Native Format Optimization), etc.
It is kind of funny to see all that companies being reluctant to adopting new technologies. Consumers who buy a new car hardly accept that the new one consumes as much gas as the old one, still IT departments seem to have settled with the fact that they just need more storage and counted for too much time on falling storage prices...
It is time now to make a real move into "green IT" for corporate IT departments!
Chris Schmid, COO balesio AG
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