An interesting discussion ensued over my recent Weblog item about how a semi-standard power cable on a Dell server wound up costing a user $700. Apparently Dell is not the only PC manufacturer that makes it hard to buy third-party peripherals.
Readers had other examples involving Dell. "This is not a new kind of tactic for Dell," wrote one reader. "Some years ago, we purchased several Dell PCs. They came with one hard drive. When we wanted to add a second hard drive, we found that while the drives were standard, the mounting rails were not -- they were unique to that particular case. Dell refused to sell us additional rails. Dell folks said to buy the drives from Dell (at somewhat inflated prices), and the rails would come with them."
But many readers chimed in with examples of similar tactics on the part of other manufacturers. "Gateway was the worst offender I dealt with on this," wrote another reader. "Had to replace a power supply, so I took it in to the local PC parts store -- they knew on site that it was a Gateway because they can only use Gateway power supplies, no off-the-shelf will fit. Same thing happened with memory on two Gateways, so Gateways will no longer be considered for any future purchase, no matter how attractive they may make their next ad campaign."
That drew a response from another about Compaq in the pre-HP days: "Going with the crowd, that was the big issue with Compaq in the past: power supplies that were unique to their cases and only available at a high price. The answer I came up with for my clients was no more Compaqs, even for servers. Looks like I'm back to white box servers, even though the margins suck these days."
And the pre-Compaq HP was no exception either. "When we bought HP some 5-7 years ago, the hard drive rails to go in the 5 1/4 inch bays in their Vectra models as well as the trays to mount the hard drives in their Net server models needed proprietary trays that only they provided," posted another reader.
2:22:12 PM 
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