'magical' ROM ??? I think that's stretching it a bit ... but to have the drive firmware closely *matched* to the drive controller to ensure proper operation and compatibility with different OS drivers is a big plus from my experience. I like knowing that all drives in an array will behave exactly the same way each time to a commoand from the controller. And I may have been one of the lucky ones, but going all the way back to the old Compaq SystemPro array controller , I've found the SMART array controllers from Compaq/HP as better than decent, compared to problems I've had with generic and older Dell PERCs. Your mileage may vary
Erik Goldoff IT Consultant Systems, Networks, & Security _____ From: Phillip Partipilo [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Friday, December 04, 2009 2:34 PM To: NT System Admin Issues Subject: RE: HP drive sleds Agreed, a rant heh J Also, reading other posts, regarding some magical ROM on the drive, I would imagine a decent RAID controller, which the HP Smartarray is supposed to be a good one, would monitor SMART parameters, and even if the drive thinks it is just fine, still set off alarms. For example, I am about to change out a Seagate SATA disk in one of my Linux workstations where smartd has been spamming /var/log/messages with increasing numbers of reallocated sectors. That sort of thing, regardless of some magical ROM (if such a thing even exists), should trigger a good RAID card to alert you. Phillip Partipilo Parametric Solutions Inc. Jupiter, Florida (561) 747-6107 ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~
