Fri Aug 4 17:25:07 EST 2006

Failed HP Drives


I know it's been ages since I've posted. But I have to bitch a bit about this one. At work we have a nice big RAID5 make up of 11 + 1 Hot-spare 250GB SATA drives. Since my return to IQE roughly 3 months ago we have had 5 of these drives fail. Usually it's no big deal because we have a 4 hour response time 24/7 contract for service. Well, one of the drives failed last night and it fell over to the hot-spare as it should do. So, when I came in this morning I got on the phone with HP and they shipped out a replacement drive. This was about 10AM or so once everything was set. So, come around 3:30PM I noticed I still didn't have a drive. I got back on the horn with HP wondering where my drive is and while talking to them a 2nd drive fails! Now I have an array operating in a degraded state. If just one more drive fails then the array is lost.

Anyway, it turned out that HP (or whoever they had deliver the drive) delivered it to "someplace" and they really didn't know where that was exactly. But the did have a signature from some person with the last name of "Lersh". No one of that name works here, or in the building next to us. Great.

Now HP is sending two more drives along with an engineer to make sure they get here. The crappy thing is I need to stick around until they come. I could probably leave and have him call my mobile but I don't want to take a chance at missing him.

All around it's been a bad week. But this just annoys me. If someone hadn't messed up I'd have an array with just one failed drive which is a heck of a lot better than the state it is currently in.

I know this isn't the most interesting post ever but other geeks who read this will understand I'm sure.

Anyway, time to wait for my drives and hope drive number 3 doesn't fail before the new ones get here. At the rate they've been dieing I'm a bit nervous.

Posted by Brian | Permalink | Categories: Work | |