In a previous state of mind, Marc Nicholas marc@hippocampus.net wrote
| Subject says it all: anyone doing it? Any success or horror stories? Any | caveats?
I did it at io.com; it wasn't that terrible. We had a 220 with 2 external racks and we did our own drive support; in a year, I only had one drive (ST15230N) go bad, and it was quickly and easily replaced by Seagate (cross-shipped, which was nice).
We were also discouraged from this support choice by NetApp, but in hindsight, it would've been the best way to go. At the time, the cost was prohibitively expensive for us, and I'm thankful that nothing worse than a bad drive happened.
It *was* a pain to keep the drive shells in stock -- they're brittle and break easily; we ruined 2 or 3 over the course of a year.
I would not recommend doing third- or self-supported drives; it's worth it to me to have someone else worry.
-cgw-
-- christopher williams cgw@pobox.org nana korobi, yo oki fnord