[Misanthrope]

The thought just occured to me:

If I were to have a standard IDE hard drive lying around, could I just install it into one of the bays inside of an Xserve, or do I have to sell my first unborn child to Apple for a 160GB module?

Thank ya kindly.

[C.J. Moof]

I'd like to know too. Would be sweet to move a years worth of retired jobs to a read-only volume on a huge internal drive, but we can do more than 160 gigs of content in a year.

The other similar option I've considered is that LaCie makes firewire externals that can be rack mounted. Not as nice, but same net effect for the end users.

[dtriska]

When the Xserve was introduced, Steve was asked whether Apple would sell empty drive modules for use with other drives. Steve said no and I'm pretty sure that hasn't changed. I don't know if there's anything physically stopping you from doing this, but Apple won't support anything but their drive modules.

[Misanthrope]

Originally posted by dtriska:
When the Xserve was introduced, Steve was asked whether Apple would sell empty drive modules for use with other drives. Steve said no and I'm pretty sure that hasn't changed. I don't know if there's anything physically stopping you from doing this, but Apple won't support anything but their drive modules.

That bastard.

Well, I'll report back here when I get mine later this month.

[CatOne]

Originally posted by Misanthrope:
That bastard.

Well, I'll report back here when I get mine later this month.

There was a reason for this -- reliability and testing. It's a SERVER product, and Apple does extensive testing on the drives.

Note there is NO QA done on the drives you buy at NewEgg or Fry's.

This same question (not sure why) was posted in the Power Mac forum, and I answered it this morning. Read there for more details.