6. Dell: Some Positives and Negatives, Continued

From the same Anonymous as on the previous page

The Bad

Just a few months ago I had a failed disk in one of my servers. I contacted tech support and they dispatched a new disk. When it arrived I noticed it was a 15K disk made by Maxtor while the disks in my system were 10K disks made by Seagate.

I know, I know...you can mix and match disks all day long in a RAID config. But generally you want to use the same make, model, capacity, speed for all disks in a set...it's just a good practice that I adhere to.

I called up Dell and told them that I'd really just like my 10K Seagate disk. They told me that my system was originally equipped with 15K Maxtors and that is why they sent the Maxtor. I proved to them that this was not true. At this point the tech said to just use the 15K disk...it would be fine. He also mentioned the reason I didn't receive the correct disk is because they ran out of them.

I forwarded this email to some other folks higher in the food-chain at Dell. They responded in the same manner. I replied and said something along the lines of: I currently have 2 systems running raid 5 in a cluster. They are both equipped with 10K Seagate disks (model# XXXX), for a total of 6 disks. One of my disks failed, I requested a replacement disk and received a Maxtor 15K disk which is more expensive than the replacement disk. Either send me the 10K Seagate or send me five more Maxtor 15K's.

This got the attention of someone. I was put in touch with a technician who had an interest in what I had to say. He agreed that it wasn't unreasonable to expect the 10K disk as a replacement. He even went so far as to offer to send me 5 additional disks. I wasn't particularly interested in this...I just wanted the 10k.

Turns out that they had a warehouse full of the disks in question and I received one the following day. Case closed.

Join our discussion on this topic: ( ) Messages

Speak out in the MobilityGuru reader survey!