Some things in this world just don’t make sense.

For instance, I have a shiny new server here. By “shiny new” I mean Pentium 3 800MHz. It’s going to be my little digital media hub at my house. Once I buy 4x 320gb hard disks and a SATA controller for it, I’ll have a pretty nice rig to throw away into the closet to use as a storage server.

Anyway, I looked in my server today to check the feasability of mounting four drives. Firstly I found that there are only three drive bays in the drive cage. That’s okay, there’s an empty 5.25″ bay to hijack.

However, the second thing was slightly more annoying. Instead of providing holes to screw disks into place like practically all desktops, the manufacturers of this server have gone for requiring drive-cage-specific drive rails to be attached to the sides of each drive before the drives will sit properly. This isn’t too uncommon in servers. Unfortunately there were only one set of these drive rails, so therefore I could only mount one drive in there.

Oh well, no problem I thought. As a resourceful geek, I went straight to the spare parts division of the OEM’s website, found the part number of the drive rails, and added it to my online shopping cart. Then looked at the price: (click to see a larger picture)

Right.

So that’s $76.54 for two pieces of blue plastic and four screws? Let me show you exactly what we’re talking about here:

Yes, it really is just two pieces of blue plastic and four screws. Yet it’s worth nearly $80?

Good thing there’s eBay, where these rails are selling for as low as about $3.95 a set. Those prices sound a little more realistic.

–Ben

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 21st, 2007 at 12:51 am and is filed under Rants. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.