Fraser Speirs Cocoa and Photos

7TB Xserve RAID for Sale (UK)

Just in case I have any interested readers, I’m auctioning my 7TB Xserve RAID on eBay. Auction ends tomorrow.

I’ll even drive it to your house, if you live on the UK mainland. Send me any questions via ebay.

Interesting to see you’re selling the XServe. Was it the noise that finally did it for you?

What storage are you using instead?

Yeah, the noise was waking up the kids Looking to replace it with a Drobo or two.

So you won’t drive it to Seattle??

I had to get rid of my Sun Fire 2100 server because of the noise. I replaced it with a Mac Pro which is almost silent. I’m really pleased with it so far. The 4 slide in drive bays are great and the setup is so much easier than Solaris or Linux. I don’t have a monitor for it (it sits in the basement) but I managed to install OS X Server without problems and use Remote Desktop whenever I want to log in to it. The Open Directory integration is really nice for Mac clients, and it works nicely as a Time Machine server. Something to consider.

Given it’s fibre, and you no doubt have a loft, wouldn’t it be cheaper to stick the Xserve in the loft and run some cables to it (this is my eventual plan).

So, don’t get a drobo. My friend has one, and he HATES it. All kinds of data corruption (supposedly fixed in firmware, but now he doesn’t trust it at all), says its slow slow slow, and its relatively limited and proprietary. He refuses to buy another one.

Anyway, that’s what he says, loudly.

I use a Guardian Maximus from OWC… its not hot swap but its hardware RAID 1. I bought the bare drive version and slotted two Seagates in. Its extremely quiet and spins the drives down when they aren’t being used. The only real noise is the clack of the heads parking and the quiet hum of 2 7200 rpm SATA drives. I like it a lot, and it runs 24×7 in my bedroom. Of course its not a 7TB array, but you can get 1TB drives now.