Is anyone using using this for raid 5? When you start looking at (3) 80 Gb drives it makes pricing much more attractive than (3)72 Gb 10K SCSI's. Not only that, but future storage additions should be less expensive. I was just wondering if anyone has any nightmare. BTW, the system would probably running RH linux if that makes a difference.
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CERC SATA controller
- Thread starter smah
- Start date
DCBennett,
What does your sales rep have to say about this? Or customer care? Or anybody at Dell? Their support of poweredge machines is generally FAR better than this, and I'm extremely curious as to why they haven't made this right.
At this point, replacing the hardware entirely is cheaper than the downtime you've already suffered--and can expect to suffer in the future, given you history of chronic problems. If I were having your problems, there is no doubt in my mind that my rep would make good--and I'm not a large customer by any stretch of the imagination. I'd expect a gratis replacement of these machines with something that actually works. If not, well, there are plenty of other server vendors out there!
What does your sales rep have to say about this? Or customer care? Or anybody at Dell? Their support of poweredge machines is generally FAR better than this, and I'm extremely curious as to why they haven't made this right.
At this point, replacing the hardware entirely is cheaper than the downtime you've already suffered--and can expect to suffer in the future, given you history of chronic problems. If I were having your problems, there is no doubt in my mind that my rep would make good--and I'm not a large customer by any stretch of the imagination. I'd expect a gratis replacement of these machines with something that actually works. If not, well, there are plenty of other server vendors out there!
Hi Jkupski,
Welcome to the world of Very Small Business - we don't have a Sales Rep and get a routed via Bangalore when we phone Sales or Customer support.
Of the 5 PE 1800's we have supplied with a total of 14 Disks, three have been fault free, one has had 3 x 160G SATA disks fail, and one has had 2 x 80G SATA disks fail.
Four fault calls in 8 months with two resulting in a total loss of Windows 2003 SBS.
Server support agreed to escalate the support for the last incident to same day (So Windows got trashed quicker:-( )
They also suggested we ran periodic tests on the disks to see if there is an underlying problem with the RAID firmware. Dell's Windows Diagnostics don't see the embedded SATA controller so this needs to be done on-site with the server booted into the Utility partition.
Replacement of the machines won't help a lot - if it's the same chassis, it may have the same problem. If it's a different chassis we are faced with a re-install of Windows SBS which is a lot of work.
Hopefully the servers will settle down and I can get some sleep!
Regards
David
Welcome to the world of Very Small Business - we don't have a Sales Rep and get a routed via Bangalore when we phone Sales or Customer support.
Of the 5 PE 1800's we have supplied with a total of 14 Disks, three have been fault free, one has had 3 x 160G SATA disks fail, and one has had 2 x 80G SATA disks fail.
Four fault calls in 8 months with two resulting in a total loss of Windows 2003 SBS.
Server support agreed to escalate the support for the last incident to same day (So Windows got trashed quicker:-( )
They also suggested we ran periodic tests on the disks to see if there is an underlying problem with the RAID firmware. Dell's Windows Diagnostics don't see the embedded SATA controller so this needs to be done on-site with the server booted into the Utility partition.
Replacement of the machines won't help a lot - if it's the same chassis, it may have the same problem. If it's a different chassis we are faced with a re-install of Windows SBS which is a lot of work.
Hopefully the servers will settle down and I can get some sleep!
Regards
David
Ouch. That does tend to explain things, doesn't it?
Still, Dell would probably be thrilled to assign you a dedicated rep (just call their SMB division and ask... shouldn't take more than two or three minutes.) Of course, this would be like closing the barn door after the horse already left--I wouldn't blame you in the least if these five boxes were the last you ever bought from Dell.
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