Question to the Storage Advisors, from Anonymous: Is a StorageTek Iceberg 9200 worth anything or is it outdated?

Wow. I can’t pass this one up. I expect to get a ration of you-know-what from my fellow bloggers, or perhaps have Terry Sweeney once again misinterpret my sarcasm. (Just yanking your chain, Terry.) But I admit to having no will power. I’m a sucker for folks selling vintage computer equipment or wondering how words are pronounced. Just doing my part to make the world a better place…

So I did a little Googling and came across this article from 1992. The article starts by explaining how StorageTek had presold over 150 units in the first four weeks, outpacing its expected production for the year. Apparently one of the key factors was the low cost.

The minimum configuration came with 64MB of cache and (are you sitting down?) 100GB (!!!) of storage capacity. Yeah, I can hear you saying, “100GB?! How did they do that?!” Well, they simply wrapped a bunch of sheetmetal around 32 off-the-shelf HP 5.25-inch disk drives. Duh.

And you get all that for the low, low price of $1.3M.

But wait - it gets better.

A high-end configuration was also available with 512MB of cache and 400GB of storage, at the still affordable price of $3.6M. Of course for that price you also get some cool data compression software.

So, after referencing the trusty Pricewatch page, I notice that a 500GB SATA drive is selling for $269. And a DDR333 512MB memory stick is around $36.

Hmm. Back to the question…

I honestly have no idea how much a 9200 is worth. Maybe there are newer versions at a higher capacity point or lower cost. But my gut feel is that it would be best used as a new reef just off Three Rooker Bar. If you can haul it down to my boat, I’ll help you dump it.

TT

This entry was posted on Friday, April 21st, 2006 and is filed under Storage Interconnects & RAID, Advisor - Tom Treadway. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.