On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 3:20 PM, Greg Smith <greg@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> Craig James wrote:
>>
>> Now that it's time to buy a new computer, Dell has changed their RAID
>> models from the Perc6 to Perc H200 and such. Does anyone know what's inside
>> these? I would hope they've stuck with the Megaraid controller...
>
> The H700 and H800 are both based on the LSI 2180 chipset:
> http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/storage/Storlink/H700H800/en/UG/HTML/chapterb.htm
>
> I'm not sure what's in the H200, but since it does not have a write cache
> you don't want one of those anyway.
>
> Note that early versions of these cards shipped such that you could not use
> non-Dell drives with them. Customer feedback was so overwhelmingly negative
> that last month they announced that the next firmware update will remove
> that restriction:
> http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/servers/f/906/p/19324790/19689719.aspx#19689719
>
> If I were you, I'd tell Dell that you refuse to make your purchase until
> that firmware release is actually available, such that your system ships
> without that restriction. That's the right thing to do for the protection
> of your company, and it sends the right message to their sales team too:
> this sort of nonsense only reduces their sales.
Well, it's the attitude that really matters, and Dell has shown how
little they think of the people who buy their machines with this move.
I gave up on them when they screwed me royally over 8 quad core cpus
that they couldn't even tell me which of my 1950's could take them,
and they have all the config codes for them. At least if I buy
something with generic mobos in it I can go look it up myself.
Also, going back to the PE16xx series and the adaptec based Perc3 (DI?
not sure which one was) had lockup problems in windows AND linux.
Dell never would take responsibility and ship us different RAID
controllers for some 300 machines we bought. We wound up buying a
handful of LSI based Perc 3 (DC? still not sure of the name) and just
pulling the RAID controller on all the rest to get reliable machines.
Never. Again.