On Mon, Jan 6, 2020 at 10:05 AM Dale <rdalek1...@gmail.com> wrote: > > The drive I have is likely > done on the drive itself, device managed, which is good for me.
Really the ideal situation are the Host Aware drives. I have no idea what percentage of the markets they make. They fall back to being device managed if the host doesn't do anything to manage them. Your drive is device managed. See the link I posted earlier to the mfr info. > I've been noticing that too. Only bad thing is, I can't always tell > what is in the enclosure. Sometimes the info is given but sometimes > not. I've also seen a few people complain that what they got was not > the model of drive they thought. Yeah, there are no guarantees as to what you'll get if you go the shucking route. If you absolutely need a certain amount of cache or a red firmware then you're just going to have to pay double to get that guarantee. For my application I'd definitely prefer the red firmware, but it isn't really the end of the world if the drive takes a few seconds to timeout on that one failure every 5 years. I'm not going to pay double just to guarantee a particular model. If it were $20 more that would be another matter, but we're talking $180 vs $350 here. The other gotcha is that if you want to do a warranty replacement at some point you're going to have to put it back in the enclosure to do so. That means hanging onto enclosures, and is of course a bit of a pain besides. Again, with a 50% reduction in cost you'd need to have a lot of drive failures to be worth worrying about, especially since I believe drive warranties are getting shorter anyway. If you're in a typical enterprise situation then you're going to want to just buy the bare drives with the standard warranty/etc. If you buy in bulk chances are you're getting a discount anyway (and then maybe you can get them in caddies or whatever). The Best Buy deals are sporadic anyway and limited in quantity - you could never run a data center that way. That's why they're priced the way they are... -- Rich
