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Buying Drives

  **NOTES ON DRIVES** Burly Storage uses Retail Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 or Hitachi Deskstar drives in all our SATA enclosures. These are the very best hard drives made for all desktop and workstation purposes, especially in RAIDs. Server and Enterprise drives have feature sets designed to increase performance in large server environments and huge Enterprise RAID farms - these features will not improve performance and may degrade reliability on desktop systems. All desktop host bus adapters are designed and tested to run with desktop drives.

  A word about OEM versus Retail Drives - Burly Storage strongly recommends that our customers avoid purchasing drives marketed as OEM (Original Equipment Manufacturer) hard drives. We suggest that you only purchase and use Retail Drives. Retail drives carry the retail manufacturer's 5 year warranty with all the contractual support that the warranty provides. OEM drives were originally manufactured under contract for one of the many major manufacturers of computers and or servers to their specifications. OEM drives often do not carry a warranty from the drive manufacturer nor from the OEM buyer. Instead they are sold to resellers 'as is' and any warranty is provided by the reseller. Worse yet, these drives may have custom firmware as specified by the OEM. We frequently see customers with OEM market drives have compatibility problems in desktop usage. There is just no way to know what you are getting when you purchase OEM drives and warranty coverage is hit or miss depending on the source. The total randomness in behavior makes it very difficult to diagnose and maintain your storage array. Data transfer problems, mounting failures and total drive failures are common when OEM drives are used. Burly Storage ONLY sells Retail drives.

  NOTE: Now that all that is said about OEM, Seagate has gone and made things more complicated by shipping the 7200.11 Retail drives with OEM labels. We have not been able to get an answer from Seagate about why this is so, and also have been unable to buy Seagate drives with Retail labels on them. The drives are Retail, with 5 year manufacturer warranty and standard firmware - every last one of them say OEM on the drive though. The Seagate 7200.11 is the king of performance, and we are going to hang in there and try and get Seagate to fix the labeling issues. The Seagate drives you receive from Burly Storage will always be Retail. Please forgive us for the confusion, we've been more than a little annoyed with Seagate over this.