On Mon, Jan 24, 2011 at 3:01 PM, Derek J. Balling <[email protected]> wrote: > > That generally gets me a part sent out on its way. No idea how that will work > with Dell, but it's worth a shot for stupid crap like "Failed Hard Drive". >
About half-a-dozen years ago I worked for a small company that didn't spend much on hardware. I'd had experience with Dell and HP before and they both seemed to be pretty decent, but because of a complete absence of any IT budget we bough a second-hand Dell server off of Craigs list or PayPal. After a couple of days it failed. I was surprised by how helpful Dell support was; the problem was immediately escalated and they overnighted a new motherboard and most other parts without any hassle at all. Then they told me that the support contract I was using had actually belonged to the previous owner and should have been invalid; from then on getting support was very difficult and time consuming. (Fortunately most of its parts were new after that so it didn't fail as often.) The level of support your purchase has a direct correlation to the level of support you receive; it sounds obvious but I was surprised by the difference. These days I buy SuperMicro almost exclusively, from Silicon Mechanics. The price/performance is the best I've found and Silicon Mechanics is very good at servicing their warranty and suppling me with the parts I need after the warranty has expired. ( I tend to run my servers to the ground, so to speak, using various software tricks to make services more highly available than I can expect the hardware to be.) -- Perfection is just a word I use occasionally with mustard. --Atom Powers-- _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
