750gb Drives for XRAID

Hey Max, the short answer is no. I haven't had much luck locating drives, and those Seagate drives you're talking about that are compatible (ST3750640A and ST3750640AV) aren't being made much and becoming hard to find, too. Last time I found a big batch at a good price was over a year ago.

Technology has come a long way since the old Apple Xserve RAID. They're great, but they're getting a little scary now -- hard to locate spare drives and parts. If a piece of it fails (a controller, power supply or even a fan), you could find yourself in trouble in a hurry. I still use several for some backups and less important stuff, but wouldn't trust it long term if you really care about your data.

So, is it worth dumping what could be thousands of dollars into an outdated box? Maybe -- if you've got spare parts and know its performance limitations. But, you might consider saving yourself some heartburn and putting the money toward something new that you could rely on.

Between this and the 10-port SANBox, it sounds like you're upgrading a fair amount of your older gear? Expanding an old Xsan? I hate to say it, but chasing 2Gb fibre channel and putting random 750GB drives in Apple RAIDs is not a good recipe for long term stability. Jordan's advice of putting together a solid 4Gb system with new RAIDs and a new 4Gb SANBox is good. You'll be thanking yourself in the long run.

I heard it is still possible to find 500 Gb drives for Xserve RAIDs. The only thing you have to make sure to have the latest firmware update on RAIDs. With off-the-shelves drives you won't get drives status through RAID admin.

Sincerely yours,

Vitali Bystritski
Apple Certified Final Cut Server Trainer
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http://www.linkedin.com/in/vitali