True.  Often they will offer a discount for you to keep it.  (At least this has 
happened to me on a number of occasions.  I did take them up on it once)

BF


From: Sam Cayze [mailto:sca...@gmail.com]
Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2011 12:46 PM
To: NT System Admin Issues
Subject: RE: What would YOU do?

Never had an issue returning anything to Dell, for what it's worth.

-Sam



From: David Lum [mailto:david....@nwea.org]<mailto:[mailto:david....@nwea.org]>
Sent: Thursday, October 13, 2011 12:27 AM
To: NT System Admin Issues
Subject: What would YOU do?

Background:
A %nightjob% client (17 employees) of mine has a Dell PowerEdge 840 with 4 SATA 
drives, two volumes of RAID1 (2x250GB for C: and D: , 2x500GB for E:)
OS is SBS 2003 and they use SQL in addition to Exchange (when I spec'd this in 
2007, SQL wasn't involved). I have split up Exchange / SQL Log/DB files as best 
I can.

This has been working OK but they app that uses SQL is kind of a pig and it and 
Exchange create a lot of disk contention. I got the bright idea to have them 
buy $600 of 15K RPM SAS drives and an external enclosure and is bundled with a 
SAS RAID5 card (PCIe 4x - this is important for later...).

I figured I'd create a RAID5 volume and point SQL over to this new drive array 
and performance should be much improved, my theory being is the system will be 
as fast or faster pre-SQL (my thinking was I might be able to move some other 
things off the SATA drives and onto the faster controller/disks).

The mistake:
Parts are onsite, and tonight I go to install the RAID card and....heeeeey, 
this system has ONE PCIe 8x slot and ONCE PCIe 1x slot, plus some standard PCI 
slots. Populating the PCIe 8x slot is a SAS 5/iR controller hooked to the four 
SATA drives. In other words, the shiny new toy I had them purchase won't work 
because I had assumed the existing RAID controller was built-in. It hadn't 
occurred to me as a remote possibility that there would be insufficient slots, 
I hadn't added a thing to this server since they'd bought it.

What would you guys do? Send the hardware back and plead mea culpa? Is there 
any way to put the existing SATA array on a different card (say, a PCIe 1x SATA 
RAID card) without having to rebuild the volumes? I've looked for SAS RAID5 
PCIe 1x (yes, it would be slower than 4x but still better than the stiff 
internal) but no luck.

Maybe I'm over thinking this after a 17hr day (between %dayjob% and 
%nightjob%), but I welcome your guys' input.

David Lum
Systems Engineer // NWEATM
Office 503.548.5229 // Mobile 503.267.9764


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