[rescue] Hotswap disk trays (was Re: It really sucks .... )

[Rip Loomis]

> D3349B sounds like the part number I found, yeah.  Last time I looked
> they were around $100 each.  I'll admit it hadn't occurred to me to look
> for HP *drives* still in their trays.  I'll give it a shot, if I can
> find the right drive part numbers.  Thanks for the suggestion!

This method actually has worked well for me a couple of times now
for Sun spud brackets and for Compaq SCA-capable hotswap trays.
The bad news is that most of the eBay auctions that have such items
for a lower (reasonable) price are the poorly written ones--so the
real trick is coming up with the part numbers and/or other effective
search terms so that you aren't having to look at a huge pile of
unrelated crap. 

Between that, and the "look for auctions of 4 or more so that the
amortized shipping gets down to a reasonable number" trick, it's
actually possible to populate an array like that from eBay.  It
sure can get pricey though if the sleds/trays/brackets are a little
less common.  Someone else was musing about an Axil RAID server IIRC...
I almost picked one up when those showed up on eBay, but the drive
trays were 100% unalloyed unobtainium...and 18 months later they
*still* are.  Hope you have better luck with the HP NetServer trays. 

 --
Rip Loomis, CISSP
Brainbench.com MVP for Internet Security   |   http://www.brainbench.com/