Re: Dell PERC H700/H800

I do think it's valid to prevent idiot customers from installing drives that
use too much power or run too hot, or desktop drives that don't support
fast-fail reads, thus driving up Dell's support load, but it sounds like
this is more of a lock-in attempt.

This is kind of a dumb move on their part .... most enterprise buyers will
buy drives through them anyway for support reasons, and the low end guys who
are price sensitive will just take their business elsewhere. I'm not sure
who thought this would increase revenue materially.

Cheers
Dave

On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 3:55 PM, Scott Marlowe <scott(dot)marlowe(at)gmail(dot)com>wrote:

> On Thu, Feb 11, 2010 at 1:11 PM, James Mansion
> <james(at)mansionfamily(dot)plus(dot)com> wrote:
> > Matthew Wakeling wrote:
> >>
> >> Just a heads up - apparently the more recent Dell RAID controllers will
> no
> >> longer recognise hard discs that weren't sold through Dell.
> >>
> >>
> >>
> http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2010/02/10/dell_perc_11th_gen_qualified_hdds_only/
> >>
> >> As one of the comments points out, that kind of makes them no longer
> SATA
> >> or SAS compatible, and they shouldn't be allowed to use those acronyms
> any
> >> more.
> >>
> >> Matthew
> >>
> > I think that's potentially FUD. Its all about 'Dell qualified drives'.
> I
> > can't see anything that suggests that Dell will OEM drives and somehow
> tag
> > them so that the drive must have come from them. Of course they are big
> > enough that they could have special BIOS I guess, but I read it that the
> > drive types (and presumably revisions thereof) had to be recognised by
> the
> > controller from a list, which presumably can be reflashed, which is not
> > quite saying that if some WD enterprise drive model is 'qualified' then
> you
> > have to buy it from Dell..
> >
> > Do you have any further detail?
>
> In the post to the dell mailing list (
>
> http://lists.us.dell.com/pipermail/linux-poweredge/2010-February/041335.html
> ) It was pointed out that the user had installed Seagate ES.2 drives,
> which are enterprise class drives that have been around a while and
> are kind of the standard SATA enterprise clas drives and are listed so
> by Seagate:
>
>
> http://www.seagate.com/www/en-us/products/servers/barracuda_es/barracuda_es.2
>
> These drives were marked as BLOCKED and unusable by the system.
>
> The pdf linked to in the dell forum specifically states that the hard
> drives are loaded with a dell specific firmware. The PDF seems
> otherwise free of useful information, and is mostly a marketing tool
> as near as I can tell.
>
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