Had the same problem with Dell servers. They tried to get me to buy their overpriced drives. With enough arguments, I was able to persuade them to sell me some drive trays only for a reasonable price. It’s a stupid policy on the part of the server manufacturers.
http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=Tower_Servermessage.id=35 (Same day, no less!)
Is it just me, or does that response boil down to We don’t sell the drive trays separately because OEM drives will break your server. Why will they break your server? Because we made it that way! Bwahahahaha!
This is a picture of the drive tray Lenovo won’t sell, at least, not without a drive attached…
http://www.diguniverse.com/images/medium/COMPUTER/SY2237442.jpg
I guess you can’t fabricate your own…
Or you can do it the hacky way and suspend them from strips of used bicycle tires. I’ve done that on several servers. Great airflow and completely silent. (but possibly that’s a bit too cheap)
Probably a fabrication would :
- Void any warranty on the sever(s)
- Make him sleep bad at night thinking of the strips breaking and shortcircuits and so on…
- Surely the datacenter would refuse to install such a server
Just sent your link to a friend of mine at Lenovo.
Will we need to count all the way to 10?
That’s awful! I remember the pain of having a Christmas present break before/on Christmas and not having anything to really play with, and with the day being a less exciting event as you get older it must be horrible when you actually have something to look forward to.
I’m sure that you’ll be able to talk them into selling drive trays to you for a fee, as long as you pester them enough into doing it.
the extra money you pay is for the warranty, which provides for next-business-day replacement
I use these data center drives for $80 each
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136143
My plan is to buy four extra hard drives at a grand total of $320 and have them sitting in their anti-static bags at the data center ready to plug in when a drive fails (all our 3 servers will use this same drive). That’s much cheaper and faster than paying exorbitant warranty hard drive prices, times the # of drives (10).
That’s actually amazingly uninteresting.
Cook-a-doodle: Yet you took the time to post.
I guess you don’t buy server hardware very often. I doubt you’ll find any non-OEM vendor who will sell you servers that don’t require you to buy hard drives from them. I’ve purchased servers from HP, Dell, IBM, Sun, EMC, they all follow the same policy. Some vendors even require a custom firmware in the drive so that even if you were to find brackets somewhere your generic drives still wouldn’t work.
If you want to use generic hardware, I recommend you buy your servers from somewhere like Supermicro.
Search eBay for those trays…
That sucks.
That’s like the adult version of getting the really cool toy and you don’t have the right sized batteries.
That’s like the adult version of getting the really cool toy and you don’t have the right sized batteries.
EXACTLY. I was so excited about getting these servers, too.
I can ghetto up something that will allow me to install the drives temporarily, for testing at least.
Bernard: Of course. Because he needs to know this isn’t interesting.
Waw. That’s really unbelievable. Not wanting to help a good customer out. And now they have done it to a the writer of popular tech blog.
Talk about bad publicity.
I’ve tried but I cannot wrap my head around this. Lenovo…what a joke.
I’ve been bit by this before. I’ve gone to buying generic Supermicro servers, which conveniently come with drive trays. They work well. You don’t get on-site part swap support contracts with them, but thats the price you (don’t) pay for cheap.
I’ve had the same problem with another manufacturer. Trays are included if you buy their overpriced disks. If you can somehow figure out the part numbers of the trays --and the matching screws!–, they suddenly do sell them separately. But those simple bits of metal and plastic will magically cost the same as the cheapest disk they sell, except you don’t get the disk. If you’re not an important corporate customer (my company wasn’t) it’s a shameless ripoff.
As suggested above, search eBay for the parts on eBay, google for refurbished parts, etc. Don’t give in to their racketeering!
Had this same problem with HP. With some searching on the net I know we were able to find a third party vendor for HP drive trays. I wish I could remember the site now, but I’m drawing a complete blank. Look around though and you can probably find someone selling replacement Lenovo trays.