Hardware vendors (was: Just when you think you've seen it all...)

Ben Scott dragonhawk at gmail.com
Tue Jun 27 10:43:01 EDT 2006


On 6/27/06, Bill McGonigle <bill at bfccomputing.com> wrote:
> I tend to use Seagates ... haven't been a big fan of Maxtor,
> but they're not that awful.  These sound as bad as the Hitachi
> DeathStar line.

  Every hard drive OEM has had bad production runs at one time or
another.  Some bigger then others (like the DeathStar you note).

  I'm happy to hear that Dell is actually handling this proactively
(the recall that Scott M described), rather then waiting for the
customer service call.  Incredulous, even.  I'll see if I get any
notice here.  :)

  One problem Dell does have (even moreso than other manufactures) is
that they sell so many units that when a recall happens, supplier
capacity becomes a serious problem.  "Yah, we'd like 500,000 hard
drives, to deliver by tomorrow, please...".

> Does anybody know if Dell gets 'special' hard drives from its
> suppliers, or if they're the same as retail?

  I'm not privy to Dell or their suppliers processes, of course, but
the drives I see in Dell hardware appear to be the same OEM part, as
far as the labeling  and electronic identification goes.  I suspect
they just slap Dell's PPID labels on ordinary drives.  It's not
"retail" in the sense that I'm sure Dell buys them by the
container-load as OEM parts, not kits with manuals and cables and
such.  Indeed, it wouldn't surprise me if Dell eats up entire
production lots at once.  That might qualify as "special", even if the
OEM isn't doing anything different.

> ... my experience has been the money saved over a better server is
> quickly flittered away, often in installation and almost always over
> the life of the machine.

  So who do you recommend for servers?  Compaq I've had too many bad
experiences with gratuitous incompatibility to go near.  I believe HP
killed their own server line when they bought Compaq.  Gateway's stuff
is limited to the "entry level", even more generic than Dell, and
their service is crap (I have to deal with two Gateway "servers", much
to my regret).  IBM I have no real experience with, but my cursory
investigation found their stuff *way* more expensive then Dell -- more
than any irritations I've had with Dell.

  Dell's MO is to be *just* good enough.  Turns out, "just good
enough" is, well, good enough for more situations.  I'm not blown away
by how good it is, but I'm also not blown away by how bad it is.

  You do have to pay for the support contact, of course, but that's nothing new.

  Dell's stuff ain't built like HP or DEC hardware of yore, for sure,
but OTOH, I don't *really* need my server to be able to support the
weight of the UPS truck that delivered it.  ;-)

>  I got one SC server I had to deal with that had a realtime clock that wasn't Linux
> compatible.

  Did you try the "--directisa" switch to hwclock?

> I thought the IBM AT solved this.

  One must remember that the pee cee isn't a standard so much as a
herd of cats that happen to end up in the same place at least 50% of
the time.

  If you want single-source reliability, buy a Sun.  Or an Apple, I
suppose -- and they look so purty.  :)

-- Ben



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