[Beowulf] what defines "enterprise class" hard drives?

[Rahul Nabar]

On Fri, Aug 6, 2010 at 7:15 AM, Paulo Afonso Lopes <pal at di.fct.unl.pt> wrote:
> As others have said, beware :-)
>
> Some array vendors do NOT allow you to use off-the-shelf disks. For
> example, I remember DG CLARiiON did not allow you to use off-the-shelf
> disks, as they flashed in new firmware into the drives. In the begining
> Field Support Techs had access to a hidden option in the array software
> that allowed them to flash COTS drives, but this was later removed. I
> suspect that EMC (and others, say HP, IBM,...) do the same.


Thanks for the tip Paulo! But I have been bitten by this before. :) So
these days I make sure that's one of the first questions I ask the
vendors: "Will it play well with other drives?" And this (along with
cost) is the reason I am _not_ buying HP-IBM.

>(sidenote on "proprietary" stuff: I have 2 Avocent 8-port non-IP KVMs, one
>IBM branded and the other HP branded; they look exactly the same model. If
>you move a KVM-to-RJ45 adapter from the IBM to the HP (or vice-versa) it
>does not work, it displays something like "Unrecognised adapter")

That's a new example of "unrecognized foobar". Another one that
surprised my recently was  my Cisco  10gigE Switch that refused to
recognize ethernet cables made by anyone other than Cisco. Well, not
cables really but the SFP's so I suppose they have a chip in there
that the  switch can query and check if the cable is Cisco-made or
not.

-- 
Rahul