Monday, January 05, 2004

Dell Server's "Proprietary Connector" Costs Customer A reader writes: We were going to transfer an internal DAT tape drive from an older Dell server to a new Dell PowerEdge 2600. While scoping the new hardware for fit/rails/etc., I noticed that there were no power cables available in the 5 1/4“ drive bays. So I called Dell Tech Support and was told that the only way to add additional drives would be to purchase Dell supplied peripherals which would come with an appropriate backplane that would plug into a proprietary connector to provide power and data transfer connections. So we got the kit from Dell. It contained a standard DAT drive, plus a standard SCSI cable. The gotcha was a semi-standard power cable that plugged into a power port on the systemboard. I probably could have found this power cable by going to a specialty cable shop or a clone computer shop, but my time is worth more than that. What Dell cheaped out on was in not providing the power cable with the server. They also didn't provide a part number for the power cable, which would have solved my problem. Their tech support was so bad that they caused me to spend $700 that was unnecessary. 6:35:46 PM    comment []