Dell Sucks

Archived discussion from Toril-2.
rylan
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Dell Sucks

Postby rylan » Sat Jan 14, 2006 1:15 am

Yeah.
So a couple years ago two of us got spanky high end systems at work. About three months ago, the other guy's hard drive (Seagate 120GB 7200rpm SATA) kicked it and he had to get a new HD and reinstall windows and rebuild from scratch. Luckily I was able to get the remains of the drive up on another system so he could get his recent files and stuff off and put it onto the new system.
At that time I thought, uh oh, I have the same drive and system so I better be careful... so I got another HD and set up RAID1 (mirror) so incase something happened to that drive, I'd just yank it and still be alright. Its supposed to work that way anyway. So I installed some patches today and rebooted, and when the windows login screen came up, I got a nice error box 'svchost.exe error, the memory could not be written blah blah blah"... goodie, so I shut down and go into the hardware raid utility, and it is showing a SMART event fault on the old drive... so I disconnect it and reboot and the error is still there. F'in bad drive had a read fault and wrote corrupted data to the good mirror. I can eventually log in after several min, but can't run anything and the desktop semi-loads, and the OS can't find any file associations to run anything.

I've had RAID before where a HD dies/fails and its smart enough to not write the errors to the good drive. No, not in the Dell implementation. Also makes me wonder where they got these drives from, since I found out that other people with this system also had their original Seagate drive die recently. Oh and of course I can't RMA the drive to Seagate even though its within the normal 3 year warranty, since Dell's crappy 1 year OEM warranty overrides the manufacturer's. Man I hate Dell.
torkur
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Postby torkur » Sat Jan 14, 2006 5:35 am

So you stripped the warranty to minimum to save a hundred bucks, set up a hardware mirror windows screwed up with a normal software error (that's a first there), and are stuck because of this? Funny, but not sure how that's Dell's fault. Hardware raid is normally a dumb mirror unless it has software to back it up.....besides the crap windows has in it that always f's up.
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Postby Kifle » Sat Jan 14, 2006 11:24 am

Weird. I also had my 120gig Seagate sata hd fail on me after only a year. I am able to RMA it, but I haven't yet since I had a spare 80gig laying around. Maybe it's that specific drive that's screwy?
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rylan
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Postby rylan » Sat Jan 14, 2006 5:03 pm

I didn't strip the warranty, thats what the company got. Incidently we've never had problems with hardware failing until they switched to Dell.
Btw yes it was a hardware mirror with software/drivers that is supposed to catch a disk error like this.
Luckily I had a ghost from a couple months ago, so I'm able to get my current work of the good mirror then retore windows to the ghost image.
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Postby kiryan » Sat Jan 14, 2006 9:22 pm

hard drive warranties have plummeted from 5 years to 1 years over the last 5 years or so... The prices have also plummted. As much as cut rate computer integrators like Dell are driving the prices and quality down, so is the market / competition.

I went out and bought a raid 5 controller and 6 drives for my desktop because I was tired of losing a hard drive every year. Since I did that, I've lost 2 drives and 0 data.
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Postby Botef » Sat Jan 14, 2006 10:01 pm

Wow, I must be one lucky SOB or something. I've owned several Dells, as well as NEC's (Who I used to like until about 1998), HP's and Gateways. In the last 10 years or so I've yet to lose any data to HD failures, let alone lose an actual HD...Infact I'm fairly proud to say my 300mhz NEC machine is still running perfectly, despite having been turned on 99.9% of the time for the last 7 and a half years. I have heard Dell has been declining quality wise, but having never had to ever have any pre-fab machines break on me I can't really say.

All of my HD troubles have been Mac related in all my experience, which is probably one of the reasons I don't like them. Usually what breaks on my PC machines though is my Modem.

I guess I better rethink about what to purchase in the future, as I'm bad about keeping up to date on my data backups and in the last few years our digital work in shop has grown at insane paces...Its scary to think how screwed we would be if we truely did lose all of our clients files to a HD failure.
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Vaprak
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Postby Vaprak » Sat Jan 14, 2006 11:50 pm

Actually, all the Seagate drives we are buying an integrating into our PCs right now have a 5 year warranty that is honored regardless of hour warranty on the system. This is true for both SCSI and SATA drives.
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