Welcome to SCSI Stuff
The Source for All of Your IT Needs. 

R720 and R620 servers now in stock!!

Featured Categories
DELL PC & Workstation  » DELL OptiPlex  » DELL PC & Monitor Combos  » DELL Precision	DELL PowerEdge Servers  » DELL Blade Servers  » DELL Tower Servers  » Other DELL Servers	DELL PowerVault Storage  » DELL Direct Attached  » DELL Network Attached  » DELL Other Storage

Scsistuff Tech tip #1:  (Solvability and hair pulling index - 10!!!!  This was a very difficult to solve problem.)

  MD1000s with SATA drives are experiencing drives falling off line ( timing out) due to the incorrect type of SATA drives installed. The issue is not related to the backplane, raid controller, EMM, or cabling.  In a nutshell the non enterprise drive has a very long time out period in relation to the raid controller.  When a drive experiences an issue caused by a command issued by the raid controller the drive goes into a very long time out period ( relative to the the speed of the raid controller) and does not respond to repeated request by the controller.  The controller thinks the drive is offline and marks the drive as offline.  By the time the SATA drive is ready the raid controller has marked that drive as failed and brings the spare drive online ( rebuild) if so configured.  Reseating the drive has no effect since the raid controller has marked the drive as failed.

98% of the generic 6 Gb/sec SATA or SATA SSD drives are not compatible with any Dell raid controller.  If you have to use SATA drive test various 3 Gb/sec SATA drive to eliminate the falling off line issue. Remember the drives may still fall off line up to 6 months after installation ( hence a long test period is needed).  SATA SSD drives are plagued with the same problem.  You must use a Dell enterprise SATA drive with the wagon wheel logo which ensures enterprise compatibility.   Scsistuff no longer sells SATA drives in the MD1000 due to this issue.

Fix:  Use Dell enterprise SATA drives or SATA SSD drives which are not prone to the timing out issue or use SAS drives.
PS.  The MD1200 or MD1220 is not authorized to use SATA drives.
 

Scsistuff Tech tip #2 ( June 15, 2013)
  Memory pricing - definitely on the rise.  16Gb server memory has risen by 20% over the past two months.  8Gb memory is up by 70%.  Lots of speculation as to why but nothing I can definitively pinpoint the root cause.