Highway Robbery

We have some spare slots in an IBM EXP810 disk tray attached to our DS4000 series storage system and thought of filling them with 1TB SATA disks. MCG Technology have 1TB Seagate drives (ST31000340AS) for $179 including tax (or 16c per GB). Note that these drives come with a 5 year warranty. So I figured a drive from IBM would probably be around the $500 mark. That would allow for an enterprise spec’ drive, the enclosure and IBM’s usual exorbitant markup.

Boy was I wrong.

Our Australian dollar ex-tax purchase price for a 1000 GB/7.2K SATA EV-DDM drive is $2100.00 each. I couldn’t believe it. That works out to $2.10 per GB – and they’re not proper sized gigabytes either.

By contrast a 750GB SATA drive from IBM comes to $850.00 or $1.13 per GB.

Now I know that the world is in a financial crisis. But that doesn’t excuse IBM ripping its customers off. It appears that the robber barons of Wall Street have moved to 1 New Orchard Road.

It’s just not good enough!

[Edited to add]

Seagate have an enterprise SATA 2 1TB disk – the Barracuda ES.2 ST31000340NS. The cheapest price on staticICE is $299