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Re: HP ProLiant SATA: buy cheap and sell dear

 

Re: HP ProLiant SATA: buy cheap and sell dear

I don't know about their design department, but their support department is overseas and they are ABSOLUTELY WORTHLESS! If you ask them a question too difficult they will turf your call. Oops, accidentally disconnected. Gee, what a coincidence that on a 20 minute phone call it only gets disconnected when you get to the point they don't know what to say. I think they are taught to specifically NOT think outside the box and NOT use their brains. If you ask a question that 3 seconds of independent thought would answer, but the words are not on their canned script, then they give you the OTHER canned script... "unfortunately I cannot answer that" or something similar.

My most recent contact with them was Tuesday, trying to locate the part number for hard drive carriers. I got the answer on this forum in a matter of hours-- got part number, price, and even the link to the HP PartSurfer. Those worthless turds in India (or wherever they are) promised-- PROMISED-- to call me back by Tuesday afternoon, or Wednesday morning at the latest with information on whether these things are even available. It's now Thursday and they still haven't called, and probably never will. Worthless, worthless, WORTHLESS.

Dell learned their lesson farming support call centers to India. Their consumer calls still go there, but after SO MANY complaints (speaking from personal experiene, it was awful) they moved their server support back to the U.S.
MMurfster
Frequent Advisor

Re: HP ProLiant SATA: buy cheap and sell dear

OK, got an update from our National Sales Rep. ALL components take on the warranty life of the server based on the serial number. That explains the BS line from the HP PB ... "between 1 and 3 years".

Y'all might want to confirm with your sales rep, but that satisfies me.

Next issue...this one is dead.

Re: HP ProLiant SATA: buy cheap and sell dear

Did he clarify how that applies to components added after purchase, which are not **originally purchased with** the server? Example: Buy ProLiant server today with a 3 year warranty. Next week purchase an HP hard drive and put that drive into the new ProLiant.

Does that drive retain its original 1 year warranty, or does it now come under the 3 year warranty of the server itself?

I suspect the drive does NOT get the longer warranty, because that would open HP to a lot of fraud. If a disk with a 1 year warranty fails in year #2, all someone would need to do is mount it in their brand new server and claim it has a 3 year warranty.

Something sounds fishy....

MMurfster
Frequent Advisor

Re: HP ProLiant SATA: buy cheap and sell dear

Danged good question. Now, don't get me wrong here, we use HP and love their products, but we hold their feet to the fire on stuff like this. National sales rep states (I was with him when he jumped on the phone for this question):
"Per the Acct Customer Svc Mangager: yes, even if you put in a drive that has just a 1 year warrantly into a Proliant server (with a 3yr warranty), that drive takes on the remainder of the SERVER warranty, regardless of the drive warranty".
So, yes, that 1yr warranty drive will take on the longer server warranty.

Re: HP ProLiant SATA: buy cheap and sell dear

Thanks for the info. Now if we could only get them to use a good brand of hard drives, instead of Maxtor. Max used to make some pretty good drives back in the 90's, but in recent years we've had such poor service life from them that we no longer use them at all.
MMurfster
Frequent Advisor

Re: HP ProLiant SATA: buy cheap and sell dear

I've used Maxtor in my personal stuff, and I agree with you 100%. Pure crap. I've never used them in the server arena. I know I have replaced at least 2 Maxtors (under warranty) before finally replacing with the WD Raptors (drool...still love those drives). I'll curse Maxtor for years to come.

In our server farm, nothing but U320's or now the new SAS drives (also very nice).

Re: HP ProLiant SATA: buy cheap and sell dear

We've had pretty good luck with Seagate Barracuda SATA models, and their warranty is 5 years. For our mission critical stuff we use SCSI from Fujitsu or Seagate, but for the majority of web, email, and application servers we use SATA because you just can't beat the price/performace ratio of those things.

All our SATA machines run mirrored disks, so a disk failure (usually) results in nothing more than 5-10 minutes downtime while we swap in a new drive, reboot the machine, and let the system re-mirror itself onto the new disk once it's back online.

Small price to pay for BIG savings compared to SCSI, over hundreds of servers.
Infrastructure man
Occasional Contributor

Re: HP ProLiant SATA: buy cheap and sell dear

Hi MMurfster,

you're the lucky guy: having better warranty in US. Let's give you some information from Germany:

There is still the written statement in the official warranty: "2)ATA and SATA hard drives have a maximum warranty period of one (1) year regardless of the warranty period for the system in which they are installed."

So you can trust a sales rep (only verbal) or trust the written warranty. I don't want to dispute with the legal department of HP what's right ...

Our HP dealer stated: if we buy additional SATA disks, the new one will have only one year warranty. Fact in Germany.

Let's assume we have the server warranty for the disks. If we buy new ones, there is still the risk of using desktop disks. Nothing where I ever store enterprise critial data on it.

HP delivers junk disks for usage in our enterprise areas. Inspiring confidence?

Re: HP ProLiant SATA: buy cheap and sell dear

We don't get a 5 year warranty from HP. I was talking about the 5 year warranty on the (non-HP) drives we buy from Seagate. Because HP uses Maxtor drives, there is no way I'll buy disks from them. We have had extremely poor service from Maxtor drives in the past few years. The most spectacular total-disaster drive failures I've seen in my career were all on Maxtor disks that failed catastrophically while in service. Our experience with Seagate is they live longer, and when they fail, they do so gradually which gives us enough time to respond and save the data.
MMurfster
Frequent Advisor

Re: HP ProLiant SATA: buy cheap and sell dear

Infrastructure man (Gruss Gott): Well, since the language of what I read was vague, I had to rely on my sales guys and the answers they get from the Product Support Managers. It "might" be that HP is taking advantage of some Euro-rule, but I'm just not sure. I do feel comfortable with the answer because frankly, HP would rather do business with us than not over a few hundred dollars. They would eat it. Now, if it was a mass quantity of drives, well, maybe there might be some negotiations or at worst, a legal issue.

I can only speak of my experience. We do a lot of volume with HP and we have a good partner relationship...but don't get me wrong, we also have the influence to hammer them on some BS like this. Again, I don't see an environment where we would run into this, but...just in case...I went to bat.

...besides, I had fun lighting fires under HP's butt over SATA drives ... and anytime I get a chance to hammer Maxtor, I do. How fun... :)