Does the Xserve RAID require Apple firmware hard drives?

So I got my new toy today (pictured below).



I am pumped, needless to say. My question involves the hard drives. I have 5 drive caddies, and I am not buying any more since they are INSANELY expensive. I have 4 in use and 1 free one. I decided to take the free one and pop in a 40GB generic hard drive (seagate), with NO apple firmware. Guess what, the light turned green and RAID Admin sees it as a spare, 40GB drive (see attached). So I tossed in a 500GB IDE drive, generic Western Digital Blue (again no Apple firmware) and the RAID Admin utility saw it as a 500GB Spare HD. Obviously I can't turn this into a RAID array because a RAID already exists with the other 4 drives, but does this mean Apple firmware is NOT required on the drive?

I am confused by this. For what its worth this is the 2002 model of the Xserve RAID, model A1009. I would GLADLY upgrade all of the drives to 500GB drives if I knew Apple firmware drives wasn't required, but I cannot tell if this is the case or not. Can anyone confirm? I am having an impossible time finding Apple IDE drives anywhere.

kingicon1 said:

You suck, I want one!

Apple doesnt do custom firmware on harddrives, you should be able to replace away.

One question I've always wondered. So then, when you order one of them beasts.. well, when you still could... they dont come full of the drive trays? or did this come second hand and maybe someone kept the rest?

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Good to know. The drives currently in it all have the Apple logo on them. I was doing some reading and a few people were saying that you need the Apple firmware since it talks to the RAID and informs it of its status. Clearly they were just full of it.

JGruber said:

Generally the way it works is when you buy the Xserve, and have it configured with lets say 2 drives out of 3, it will only come with 2 drive modules, leaving 1 extra drive bay without the module. And like the OP stated, they are VERY expensive. For our Xserve the run about $400 each.

Also OP, you can cram any Non-Apple HDD in it without any problems. Depending on the server, your limited to 500, 650 or 1TB drives. Based on the age of the Mac, and the fact you have an IDE interface, 500GB is the biggest. But that's still not bad!

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Sounds good, I think I will go with 5x500GB drives. That would give me just under 2TB of storage on RAID 5. Initializing that array will take about 3 days I am guessing.

JGruber said:

There are 2 styles of drive caddies, one that just fills the empty bays, to make it look uniform, and the drive caddies that have the ability to use a HDD in them. Here is a picture of my Xserve Drive Caddie without the drive in it. His should look close to this one.

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If you are ever getting rid of any trays, let me know. $$$.

Tallest Skil said:

I don't get it. Don't you already have all of the drive caddies? That picture looks like you do.

Or is the XServe RAID not at all like the Mac Pro (in that it has trays)?

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Yeah, it has been said above but the Xserve RAID comes with however many physical drives you configure it with then the remainder of the bays are filled with empty filler plates. Its bogus because the Xserve RAID IDE caddies are incredibly expensive and even harder to find. The fact that I have 5, in a working system makes me feel like I am sitting on a small fortune to the tune of about $2,250.

I think its bogus that servers often come with the empty, non-functional filler plates. What good is a 14-bay server if it only has 5 usable trays? This just frustrates me to no end as it makes it nearly impossible to add more drives to any server after the manufacturing end-date has passed.

On a similar note, I was also given a Relion 240 server with dual 2.8GHz Xeon processors and 6 Seagate Cheetah SCSI 10,000 RPM hard drives in it. The thing screams because of the drives, but if any drives fail I am going to be too cheap to replace them. SCSI drives are insanely expensive, $1-2 per GB depending on size. Ugh.

Tallest Skil said:

Well, that's a frigging crock. LOOK at that thing! I'm glad that Apple got out of the rackmount RAID business.

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As far as looks go, I personally think the Xserve RAID has a pretty sweet appearance. The fiber activity lights on the front are dazing when they start to dance from activity. The dual RAID cards with fiber modules allow for a lot of flexibility across the 14 bays, the fact that you can install 2 batteries or hook directly up to a UPS via serial is nice also. Overall I think it makes a great enterprise backup system.

And like any Apple computer, its heavy. This thing weighs 100 pounds (45 kilograms for those not in the US). And the replacement parts are incredibly expensive, just like any other discontinued Apple product. I love it.

belvdr said:

Just a note, the blanks aren't there to make it look uniform. They are put there to ensure air is being pulled across the drives. If 5 of the blanks were not inserted, more air would be pulled from that space rather than across the drives.

Why they don't ship them with drive caddies instead, I'll never know.

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Because the extra hardware would increase manufacturing costs by about $1.75. Ugh. If that thing had 14 IDE drive caddies in it I would be so happy right now.

belvdr said:

Yeah, it really stinks. I haven't seen the Apple drive blanks, but is there any way to hack it?

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I'm guessing not since it would be missing the LED status lights (not a huge deal). Also inside the caddy there is the IDE and power cable that goes into a proprietary board that connects when you slide the caddy in.

bartzilla said:

As I said...
a cynical move by manufacturers to ensure that you end up going back to them for the disks because you need to buy the caddies as well, and you end up paying well over the odds for the drives.

Industry standard practice for a lot of storage systems I'm afraid. Of course this is just to "help you" by ensuring the drives you purchase are "compatible".

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Thats so true. They charge well over double the cost of a drive from newegg.com for example. We are pricing out some Dell server's at work and they were charging over $220 per 500GB SATA drive, where on newegg.com you can get 2 1TB drives and still have some cash to spare for $220. Its bogus.