PS5500 & PS6500 and minimal disk configuration.

that would mean that TCO is quite substantial (if not massive) for these products - such a nice, really nice piece of a hardware/software and no way to drop in larger capacity drives?? Even Dell themselves don't offer any.

thanks Don for your help.

You are very welcome.

Well the 5500 is End-of-Life so no surprise that larger drives aren't offered.  

The 6500 wasn't designed or tested for the larger drives that are out now.   So power and heat could be a concern with newer and larger drives.   It's been replaced with the much larger 6610, which supports much larger drives and more of them per member.  (84)

Re: custom firmware  It's also very common practice in the storage industry.  Supporting off the shelf, unqualified drives becomes an impossible task.   I.e. mixing of drive vendors, firmware, etc..   Performance and quality problems abound in such configurations.  

Regards,

Don

I, guess everybody else here, understand quality of service and similar terms meanings - however - the fact that Dell have never considered to offer a single upgrade of disk speaks for itself. It's a bad managerial decision, bad politics in my opinion.

It's a loose chatter we are having here but I can say that a few years after I bought a couple PS5500, learning that I was never going to have a choice of any hardware upgrade whatsoever, I promise, I'll never make this mistake again. :)

best wises.

Re: Drive upgrade.  I don't disagree with you.  There are some technical challenges trying to do that live w/o downtime.  You'd need a loaner chassis and downtime to do a member add / member evacuate in that case.  Otherwise it's a reset, add new drives, then restore.  Which went against some of the design principles for the PS series arrays.  

On the plus side being able to migrate to new models w/o having to do a fork lift upgrade is impressive.

Regards,

Don