A Customer Complained That One Server Drive Was Much Slower Than The Others, But Weeks Of Support And A Full Replacement Later, They Found Out He’d Installed An HDD Alongside His SSDs
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Sometimes, it’s easier to just listen when the person who knows the system tells you what the problem is.
One technician learned that after a customer complained that one drive in a server was running much slower than the others.
The support team explained that the customer had added an HDD to a setup that was otherwise using SSDs, which would naturally make that drive slower.
But the customer’s IT guy wouldn’t accept that answer, so the issue dragged on through dozens of emails and eventually a full server replacement.
After days of testing the original machine under heavy load, the technician found absolutely nothing wrong with it.
Read on to check out the full story.
Customer doesn’t understand the difference between a HDD and a SSD
I work for a fairly old company that has been building and configuring servers for customers all over Europe and even a few across the globe in China/USA and the like.
One of our products is a standard server chassis with hardware tailored to the customer’s needs, with a motherboard, CPU, and NIC, and any add-on cards the customer needs.
This customer bought a fairly standard server with not really any special motherboard or crazy CPU, and just a network card and a storage controller as add-on cards.
When they shipped it out, everything was working perfectly.
We shipped it out to the customer about a year or two ago. All working fine with a few SSDs installed in the 12 SSD/HDD slots. Operating system already installed.
Now there were still a few empty slots left, so we keep the trays for installing additional 3.5-inch hard drives in the chassis as per company policy.
Now onto the not-so-experienced customer who had bought an additional hard drive. Yes, you heard that right, an HDD, which, although not much, is still slower than SSDs.
Suddenly, they had a server that was slower than others.
Now, as I said before, we installed SSDs as per the customer’s orders (all items are put in an invoice, which is sent to the customer for approval and final go for the order). So the customer knew full well what they were getting.
Now, a couple of weeks ago, our support team gets a ticket stating that one of their drives in the server is substantially slower than the others, and they can’t work like this and whatnot.
So, after about 20 emails back and forth, and the email chain growing and growing with pauses in between because of vacations and sickness on their side, we finally get to the point where my colleague has no more ideas and decides, you know what, there’s nothing wrong with the server, but the IT guy from their company will not believe or accept that.
To appease the customer, they went to work.
So we go ahead and build a complete copy of their server. They swap the SSDs and HDD and send us back the “faulty” server.
After some time and the email chain growing to about 70 emails, which is a hassle to read through in order to find out what exactly the problem was in the first place, we get the server.
I am tasked with testing it by basically letting it run under full load and testing several drive slots at the same time to see if anything is broken or has any errors.
For days, they tested the server at full load.
And by full load, I mean full load. That server was running for several days under 100% CPU, 100% RAM, and maximum performance each disk could achieve. And no issues, no errors, or any sudden reboots or slower speeds, even under highly unlikely 100% CPU load.
So now we have spent our time and effort fixing a nonexistent problem.
Afterwards, I then found out through my colleague that the customer installed the HDD and that they had a talk about the slower speeds of HDDs and that it’s likely the problem the IT guy from the other company was reporting. But he was too shy or embarrassed to admit it via email or on the phone with my colleague.
Luckily, they still made money on the job.
Needed context for this story: The server we are talking about cost them about €10,000 plus about €5,000 in service fees for our support and advance replacement if needed.
We, on the other hand, could buy these parts at about €7,500, so we still made money, but it’s way less whenever something has to be replaced because we can’t sell these parts as new.
We can only keep them in our stock, mark them as service, and send them out once somebody needs a warranty replacement or an advance replacement.
Yikes. It sounds like the company needs a better in-house IT guy.
Let’s check out what the readers over at Reddit think about this whole thing.
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This is actually pretty interesting.
Some people just don’t know much about computer hardware.
This reader has questions.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a woman who finds herself in a tough spot when a coworker reports her for the “policy violation” of having her personal water bottle at the register.
It seems like even IT people learn new things often.
What a waste of time.
There’s nothing wrong with not knowing the difference between two types of drives, but that’s exactly why you listen to the people who do.
And if you don’t want to listen, then at least take some time to do research and educate yourself.
Let’s hope he learned a lesson and doesn’t do that again.
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