disk drives for Sunblades 1000

[James Brigman]

> We are looking to add more disk drives (72Gb disks) to our Sun
> Blade 1000s.
> Can anyone recommend companies (other than SUN) that are compatible to the
> SUN OEM part (PN X6742A), and work with no problems?

Sun uses Seagate and Conner (nee' Maxtor), and ironically, IBM. Most any
third party drive will work, but beware: you may not be able to mix and
match sun and non-sun drives and expect them to work with Veritas Volume
Manager or ODS. Historically, there have been small changes to the drive
firmware which customize sector layout on the drives.

If you aren't using a volume management product to RAID the drives, you
should be just fine mixing and matching. Just be aware when you're laying
out the disk.

Sun used to have problems supporting of a system without Sun drives inside.
You could get a better deal by buying real sun drives from a trustworthy
reseller, but you've got to have one heckuva support contract to make that
work. You could also just buy a boatload of the non-sun drives and
self-support. There's a tad bit more risk to that, but if you want to be
able to handle disk outages as fast as possible, you've got to do that (keep
a few on the shelf) anyway.

JKB