We haven't noticed this yet on R710s but ours have PERC6, As a customer of Dell who has hundreds of these, if we do notice this, we will be using something else in the future. It is plain too expensive, too slow, and too difficult to get drives if we need additional drives for our Dells, I also agree that SATA is SATA.
Thanks, -Drew -----Original Message----- From: linux-poweredge-boun...@dell.com [mailto:linux-poweredge-boun...@dell.com] On Behalf Of Stroller Sent: Saturday, February 06, 2010 8:26 AM To: Dell Linux Mailing List Subject: Re: Third-party drives not permitted on Gen 11 servers On 5 Feb 2010, at 22:31, Philip Tait wrote: > I just received my first Gen11 server, R710, with H700 PERC. I removed > the supplied drives, and installed 4 Barracuda ES.2s. After doing a > "Clear Configuration" in the pre-boot RAID setup utility, I can > perform > no operation with the drives - they are marked as "blocked". > > Is Dell preventing the use of 3rd-party HDDs now? Thanks for posting this. That Dell are doing this seemed to be hinted at in another post a couple of days ago, and I wasn't sure if I was reading right. Out of concern that I might be miscomprehending I really wanted to do some homework before kicking up a fuss. I have to say I'm gob-smacked to read this confirmed. £79 ($123) for a 250GB SATA hard-drive is, these days, a little pricey. We can get those for £25 anywhere else, but we tolerated the mark-up when we ordered recently because Dell have always been good value to us otherwise - let them have their cream. We bought a handful of these small drives because we figured they'd include the caddies. Those are worth £25 or so to us (that's what we paid for secondhand caddies for a 4 year old server last month), so we bought a good number of low capacity drives to include those, expecting to upgrade the drives themselves in a year or two. Markups on larger drives are taking the piss, however. £220 for 1TB - £53 elsewhere, £740 for 2TB drives that are £100 from the local warehouse! And the commodity drives have longer warranties! Dell give only 1 year as standard, AND THE PRICE ISN'T EVEN THE POINT! The point is the lock-in - if you sell us something that takes SATA hard-drives, I expect ANY standard SATA hard-drive to run in it. Why wouldn't it? I have to say I'm a bit gob-smacked by this. Half of me wants to refuse to accept Dell's delivery on Monday, half of me figures this ain't such a big deal; we'll tolerate the limitation on this machine & maybe it'll all blow over. I'm just completely WTF!?!? over this, I'm at a loss how to respond. We certainly won't buy another machine from Dell whilst they carry this policy. I just find it completely stunning that Dell, without some kind of a warning, would sell me a "SATA" computer that doesn't accept standard SATA drives. I've spent years defending Dell. I encounter people who assume from the price that Dells are low-quality mass-produced crap, and I correct them. When someone has (rarely) told me a horror story of shitty customer service from Dell, then I have replied that every manufacturer has some dissatisfied customers; that might not reassure the recipient of bad service, but I discourage other people I meet from taking these anecdotes at face value, and contrast with the great customer service I have always experienced from Dell. I cannot count the number of computers Dell have sold on my recommendation. In the last fortnight I have dropped a software product (for Windows) that I have deployed at hundreds of sites. It's no longer part of new installs, it's being removed & replaced on systems as they come in for service. Other people I meet tell me they're dropping the same software now, too. I guess I saw this coming 18 - 24 months ago, when I was cussing the vendor for a new "feature", and asking out loud "what did they do _this_ for?". I was cussing them a year ago, and within the last 6 months the bugs in their software have *really* been taking the mickey. This really feels like Dell going the same way. I drafted a rant about that vendor in (I see from my notes) June 2008, and never quite got around to polishing it and blogging it. Hopefully, since I've found the time on this quiet Saturday morning to complete this email, someone at Dell will bother to read it. Stroller. _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq _______________________________________________ Linux-PowerEdge mailing list Linux-PowerEdge@dell.com https://lists.us.dell.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-poweredge Please read the FAQ at http://lists.us.dell.com/faq
