The Inverted Pyramid of Doom

Brant Wells wrote:

What makes the pods such a bad choice? If you put some enterprise class SATA drives, why is that any worse than say a similarly built HP server? Are we talking motherboard & cpu choice (I had one quoted that was Intel) or storage back-end or what?

Intel is pretty low end mobo in my world :) Enterprise class SATA is fine, but makes this much more expensive. Much of the design is based around being cheaper than that. The Pod itself isn't hot swap, has heavy vibrations (although that is improving) and relies on large scale software RAID. Can you do it in RAID 10, use enterprise SATA... yes. But once you start doing that you start defeating the goals of the dirt cheap chassis and low power whitebox server. For barely any more money you could move up to a hot swap, tier 2 server like SuperMicro and for not...