Re: can POWER6 IBM i or System i run on non-IBM disk drives?

Gadzooks is this guy speaking from a point of ignorance....

As has already been mentioned they are not the same and won't work anyway, sector size, firmware, etc etc.

*IF* you got them to work then you would still have to deal with the following issues:

1) Their MTBF is a mere fraction of drives designed and built for use in servers that pound drives 24x7.
2) Their sustained throughput isn't as good as drives designed for the purpose.
3) Consider protection. It takes roughly 3 hours to build or rebuilt a RAID set on 140GB drives. Extend that to 1TB drives and you get about 21 hours! So WHEN (not IF, WHEN) one of those monster 1TB drives fails you get a minimum of 21 hours of time with no protection and that's AFTER the replacement drive is installed.
4) Consider that there have been multiple firmware issues with these huge drives where they get 'bricked' and your data is gone.
5) Nearly every system I work on these days has plenty of disk capacity, it's ARM count that's hurting, 1TB drives surely won't help that in any way at all.

Even if you could you do NOT want these drives in your i.

- Larry

elehti@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

Our network admin (a LINUX/PHP/open source/anti-IBM type of guy) says,
"If you need additional disk drives for your POWER6 IBM I machine, you
don't need to buy expensive disk drives from IBM. Just buy some cheap 1-terrabyte Western Digital drives from Egghead,
etc. Their drives will work just fine."

Uh, I think that other drives would not work in this machine. Your thoughts? I don't know why I let his outlandish comments get under my skin.
Now I will post a question to IBM tech support and have them
verify/contradict his claim.
Then maybe I will be able to sleep undisturbed.