-----Original Message----- From: Dave Hull
Quoting Brian Densmore:
Compaq servers can also be purchased with Linux on them right?
... During the era when I was working with Compaq hardware, everything was proprietary. If a drive failed or a stick of RAM failed, they had to be replaced with Compaq parts. And those parts failed on a regular basis.
... when Compaq and HP merged...
Maybe part of the reason Compaq merged with HP was, failure rates and proprietary parts. We just got in a Compaq server for a client last week and it looked like a pretty decent server.
I've been working on Dell hardware at work, exclusively for the last six years
So then you have no recent experience with Compaq servers then. Six years is an eternity in this market.
and have been extremely pleased with it. I was running Linux on hardware from Dell before they supported it with very little problems.
No one ever said Dell didn't work with Linux, but just that they are not really supportive of Linux. In fact I hear lots of complaints about their Customer support.
But what it boils down to is there are plenty of stories going both ways. Dell has always had a pretty decent reputation for rock-solid hardware. Compaqs have always had a rep for proprietary. HP has always been known as rock-solid and expensive. IBM is well IBM. Then there is everyone else.
I don't have much experience personally with any brands as I tend to build whatever I need, because the hardware is always rock solid, the price is competitive and the service is outstanding. So I get the best of all worlds. If something fails I always know who to blame, and where to go to get it fixed.
[Let the hardware religion war continue]
Brian D
On Monday 24 January 2005 11:43 am, Brian Densmore wrote:
Dell has always had a pretty decent reputation for rock-solid hardware.
Gotta watch that "a" word.
I installed a whole office of Dells a while back, and within two weeks every one of them failed due to a bad drive image. Then there's Tom's saga - how many replacements so far Tom?
This is my 3rd replacement, i've had it 1 week, and already having a new hard drive shipped to me.
Jonathan Hutchins wrote:
On Monday 24 January 2005 11:43 am, Brian Densmore wrote:
Dell has always had a pretty decent reputation for rock-solid hardware.
Gotta watch that "a" word.
I installed a whole office of Dells a while back, and within two weeks every one of them failed due to a bad drive image. Then there's Tom's saga - how many replacements so far Tom? _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug
On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 19:57:54 -0600, Jonathan Hutchins hutchins@tarcanfel.org wrote:
Dell has always had a pretty decent reputation for rock-solid hardware.
Gotta watch that "a" word.
I wholeheartedly agree, My experience with dell laptops was marred with many many failures. Mostly due to the fact that dell makes(kinda hard to call it make when they just assemble commodity parts) stuff as cheap as possible. Sure everyone skimps, but not as much as dell.
My company also started focusing on dell and redhat for a server platform. My opinion is this is a bad decision on both parts, but this isn't an OS war we are having. We haven't had any serious hardware problems with any of the server class dells, only minor things like unstable firmware on perc controllers etc... On a scale of 1 to 10 I would rate dell server hardware at about 7.5 or 8. Laptops I would rate somewhere around 1.5 to 2.
I haven't used any newer compaq/hp server hardware, but the older stuff was rock solid, except the fact that you had to boot smartstart (windows cd) to configure the array, and you _have_ to use a mouse to configure your raid, you cant just simply tab around thru it like the dell perc menus. There should be no reason to have a mouse on a server, and the fact that you had to boot a separate os from a partition or from the cd to change anything is really annoying. But other than that, rock solid.
--ben
At 08:17 PM 1/24/2005 -0600, you wrote:
On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 19:57:54 -0600, Jonathan Hutchins hutchins@tarcanfel.org wrote:
Dell has always had a pretty decent reputation for rock-solid hardware.
Gotta watch that "a" word.
In the 9 Dell desktop PCs we installed in my department at work a year ago we've already had 2 hard drive failures, 2 NIC failures, and one dying monitor. All different PCs.
7 years ago we installed 45 Compaqs and in the first year we had 5 motherboard failures and 3 monitor failures. By the end of the 30 month lease the monitor failure had risen to over 10.
Does anyone make reliable PCs anymore?
On Mon, 24 Jan 2005 21:30:47 -0600, Jonathan Hutchins hutchins@tarcanfel.org wrote:
On Monday 24 January 2005 08:17 pm, Ben Kelley wrote:
unstable firmware on perc controllers etc...
That's for the coffee maker, right?
Lol, and for those who don't know perc is the name of the dell raid controller.
-
Allen Darrah -
Ben Kelley -
Brian Densmore -
James R. Sissel -
Jonathan Hutchins -
Tom Bruno