🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <7hhmv2l0h4ap03obi9lld6ik79dkm3664k@4ax.com>, Anthony R. Gold
<not-for-mail@ahjg.co.uk> writes

>The application is in the USA and must run Windows.  And I found a unit
>which seems to meet my hardware needs for home or colo'ed use, but I'd
>appreciate any words of warning.  What attracted me about this one was the
>low profile 1U height and the 2x250GB SATA drives.

The SATA drives would put me off.  I run two DL360G3s at a remote
location, but those have SCSI drives.

We tried out an HP Proliant DL100 storage server (which is basically a
DL360 with 4 PATA drives in hotplug chassis) and had multiple failures
of all four drives.  No data was lost as they were configured in RAID5,
but the machine was hopelessly unreliable and the cost of travelling out
multiple times to replace failing drives meant that the cost of the
machine far exceeded the cost of one with decent SCSI drives, and that's
not mentioning the worry of running the array degraded with one failed
drive (in case a second one went tits-up and lost all the data), and
having to monitor the bloody thing twenty-four hours a day to see which
drive failed next.  

HP were good about replacing drives under warranty, but that's not the
point: you don't want the bloody things to be failing in the first
place.  That's the point of servers: you pay a lot for them and have a
right to expect commensurately greater reliability from them.

In the end, I junked the IDE drives, but kept the machine. It came with
an Adaptec U160 SCSI card installed as part of the base spec, and I
bought and attached an external SCSI RAID chassis to the card with 300GB
SCSI drives fitted.  Cost a lot, yes, but has been a helluva lot more
reliable!

>  A lot of small servers
>seem to come with just small SCSCI drives.

Yebbut.  SCSI drives are enterprise-grade.  This shows in the price and
their longevity.  The makers also offer an extended warranty (usually 5
years).  The saying "you get what you pay for" has never been truer than
in this case.

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