[Andrew Carr]

if there are any other failures not covered here please post below.

[madmac]

Mine hasn't died but is displaying the system temperature as a mad 93 C
HP said it's a faulty sensor but I can't take the chance.

[Deaky]

Both of the 500Gb Seagate drives have failed on my system. The replacements sent by HP were Hitachi disks :blink:

[blackthorn127]

Hi my 470 which is two months old PSU has died. HP are sending me a new carcus however they have none in stock and don't know when they will!!!!!!!!!!! :angry:

[Darkone]

I have had a problem where my EX475 would not restore to the supplied Seagate hard drive. It seems that I manage to trip a form of what I call copy protection. This cost me all files on the EX475 as HP want me to restore to the other drive. Which did not accomplish anything actually.

I also suspect that the power supply fan is beginning to fail.

[Greybeard]

:angry: I received my server on 8 May and set it up same day. On the 12th I had to restore the system because somehow a file got
corrupted and nobody could connect. Then on the 15th or so the temperature was reported to be in the 70° range. I called in and got a case started. During the weekend the temp reported 80°. At no time did the case feel hot, nor was there any problem other than a report of "unhealthy" disk which the C: partition resided on. That ocurred every day. Today I got a message from tech support telling me to return the unit as DOA and get asn exchange. I called customer service, got my RMA and was e-mailed a shipping label. Tomorrow the server goes back. They (HP) will ship the exchange as soon as they receive the faulty unit. Darned good thing they decided this today. On the 21st I am supposed to receive the LE1620 CPU. Had this waited until next week, I would have had the RAM and CPU to pull back out.

[GryphonHPS]

5 months old and the PSU has died. HP Support have given me a case number and told me that the UK Repair Centre will be in touch 'within 8 hours' and should be sending out a complete new chassis. All drives and caddies are to be removed and the failed unit should not be returned until the replacement has been installed commissioned and checked to make certain it is working 100%.

Can't say my confidence in HP hardware is exactly strong as I had a fan failure on my MV2020 last year which took more than 10 weeks to be resolved due to a complete lack of spares in the UK. A new unit was finally sent out but the support provided at that time was quite frankly appalling with misinformation, ignored phone calls, no replies to phone calls and delays. Even HP UK could not get a a straight answer from the support centre in Warrington. HP UK finally sent me a 6MP digital camera as a 'sorry' pressie. The new MV2020 is running fine (at present).

I'll be pleasantly surprised if I do get a call from the repair centre today, but I'm not holding my breath for one. I suspect there will be no spares for this unit either so another long delay will ensue. I think they can keep hold of it and technically do nothing for 28 days and then just send a new unit out, but that story changes depending upon which part of HP UK or the repair centre you talk to. In my MV2020 case the story changed three times in two days.

I am concerned that this is a server and therefore is hardware that is supposed to run on a 24/7 basis, but appears to have a very short operating life and fails so easily. HP is supposed to be the No 1 manufacturer after all. I guess it all comes down to the pricing point in the end, but.....

[GryphonHPS]

Well as expected I had no reply from HP or its Repair Centre in the UK and contacted them again after the 8 hours elapsed.

I finally got through to the UK Repair Centre in Warrington to be told that the current position is that there are "no spares available, no replacement server chassis available and no ETA of when they might be, please contact HP Customer Services for any more information". Wonderful!!

This pretty much means that if you by an MSS in the UK and it goes wrong it could be weeks before you get a replacement.

As this is not the first piece of HP hardware I have bought which has then not been supported by a decent support/replacement programme after a hardware failure, I have concerns that HP simply either does not care about its buyers once they've paid up or has a real problem with its support management systems.

As the number of PSU failures starts to rise, it raises question marks over the design and component strength/tolerances in use. PSU failures are appearing on all the MSS websites, but strangely seem to be limited to the UK - voltage too close to the PSU upper tolerance limit?

Would I buy HP again - no chance. I've been bitten twice now.

[Sofaloafer]

Got my shiny new Mediasmart. loaded my whole life onto it....photos, family videos, documents you know the lot and before I could back it up onto an external HDD...BANG! ....the PSU died. Luckily for me John Nelson at Ripcaster was on side and managed to retrieve all my data and get a new unit out of HP. He reckons that this is a bad batch of PSU's from HP.

Moral of the story is BACK IT UP!

[autodrivel]

Andrew,

As a sort of perspective check, might it not be an idea to include a survey option of:

Not Failed/No Problems for (3month/6months/1Yr+)

It is my experience that these sort of polls can be taken out of context.
Not including a control group of "No problems" makes the stats invalid - For example if 1000 people have an HP unit and 50 of them respond to the poll with one sort of problem or another, without the "No problems" option the other 950 people have now way of saying they are happy campers and also to allow the poll to show that the HP units have a problem in only 5% of the units (50 out 1000).

I agree that the above example is totally theoretical and the psychology of these polls are generally that only those people who hurt cryout - so in the above example you might still get the 50 people with problems but only 10 people bother to report "no problems" - which leads to very biased stats. However, without a the control option NOBODY will be able to report "no problems".

Just a thought

[Andrew Carr]

Agree entirely with your comments, as you say only those who have had a problem may/will report it.

I guess the poll was more about a) roughly trying to get an idea of what the problems are eg PSU/HD etc. And b)collate a few rough results.

I'm sure the majority of HP MediaSmart owners are "happy campers" but I don't have any numbers on how many mediaSmart servers HP have shifted world wide to know what percentage have problems, and, although its hard to believe :P , I don't think everybody who buys a HP MediaSmart server joins the happy family at WGS and or would give us feedback on their experiences.

As for the stats being invalid, I suppose like everything else that one comes across on the web you have to thoroughly read around the subject to get an unbiased opinion.

Thanks for the comment

[wabyrd]

It appears that my problem is the onboard NIC. System seems to boot ok (based on watching and listening, of course no VGA). Blue network health light on the front, but only the yellow light on the back of the network plug. My switch lights are out as if nothing is plugged in. Sad...I've only had it for 2 months.

[server person]

wabyrd, on Jun 22 2008, 05:59 AM, said:

It appears that my problem is the onboard NIC. System seems to boot ok (based on watching and listening, of course no VGA). Blue network health light on the front, but only the yellow light on the back of the network plug. My switch lights are out as if nothing is plugged in. Sad...I've only had it for 2 months.

I have had many, many, many problems with my server since I purchased it in February. Most of the problems have been connection problems. I have had to do five factory restores. After each restore, the server works ok for about 5 to 10 days. Then, I begin have connection problems again. Lately, I got a warning that the system drive was failing. HP is sending me a replacement drive. Maybe this with solve my issues.

I would really like to know if anyone has an HP MediaSmart Server that actually works correctly and reliably all of the time. This is what I paid for and should get from HP. If HP cannot deliver a reliable server, they should recall this product and give full refunds to all of their customers. I would also like to be compensated for the many many many hours spent talking to HP technical support.

So is my experience unusual or is it typical? I would really like to know. This could affect whether I head off to the court house to file a lawsuit.

[Darkone]

server person, on Jul 4 2008, 11:54 AM, said:

I have had many, many, many problems with my server since I purchased it in February. Most of the problems have been connection problems. I have had to do five factory restores. After each restore, the server works ok for about 5 to 10 days. Then, I begin have connection problems again. Lately, I got a warning that the system drive was failing. HP is sending me a replacement drive. Maybe this with solve my issues.

I would really like to know if anyone has an HP MediaSmart Server that actually works correctly and reliably all of the time. This is what I paid for and should get from HP. If HP cannot deliver a reliable server, they should recall this product and give full refunds to all of their customers. I would also like to be compensated for the many many many hours spent talking to HP technical support.

So is my experience unusual or is it typical? I would really like to know. This could affect whether I head off to the court house to file a lawsuit.

Just my two cents, I have a MediaSmart EX475 and I've not experience anything that I would classify as a "connection problem" now truthfully I'm not sure what you may mean by this. If covers a wide area potentially. It sounds to me as if in your case, (the 5 to 10 day lag before the problem resurfaces as if it may be something you are doing.) I would guess if it's an actual hardware problem the failure would occur a lot quicker than that. I am curious if you do a factory restore, and stop, load nothing else, do you still develop a problem in 5 to 10 days. If you actually do, I would consider a new router on your network. Again I don't **know** what your actual connection problem is, but routers are cheap, and if it has the newest firmware in it, I would try a different router. Hopefully from a store where you can return it if it doesn't solve your issue.

[server person]

Darkone, on Jul 4 2008, 04:30 PM, said:

Just my two cents, I have a MediaSmart EX475 and I've not experience anything that I would classify as a "connection problem" now truthfully I'm not sure what you may mean by this. If covers a wide area potentially. It sounds to me as if in your case, (the 5 to 10 day lag before the problem resurfaces as if it may be something you are doing.) I would guess if it's an actual hardware problem the failure would occur a lot quicker than that. I am curious if you do a factory restore, and stop, load nothing else, do you still develop a problem in 5 to 10 days. If you actually do, I would consider a new router on your network. Again I don't **know** what your actual connection problem is, but routers are cheap, and if it has the newest firmware in it, I would try a different router. Hopefully from a store where you can return it if it doesn't solve your issue.

The HP guys also tried to place the blame on my router so I have already replaced it. The router works just fine for everything except for my server. I keep losing the connection between my server and my network. When that happens, I cannot get to the server with the console or with Remote Desktop Connection. Sometimes, I can ping it and sometimes I cannot. Discovery does not find it. I had previously identifed the problem as being related to the IP address. When using DHCP, sometimes the server's IP address would change. Then the new ip address would not match the ip address linked to the server name in the host file. I still don't really know why I need an entry in the host file but that is what HP always advises to fix a connection problem. Anyway, because of the changing ip address problem with DHCP, I used Remote Desktop Connection to access the server. Then I set it up for static ip. That solved my problems for awhile. But when I tested PC restore to be sure it worked, the PC restore software could not find the server. I set the server back to DHCP and then the PC restore could find the server. So then I left the server on DHCP and got a new router that had DHCP reservation. I reserved a DHCP address for the server that matched the host file entry. Finally, at last, or so I thought, my connection problems were solved. But that was not to be. After a few days, I again lost the connection to the server. I could ping it sporatically but could not connect. Nothing worked. So I again did a factory reset. All was well for a few days. Then again I lost the connection. After trying everything else, I did a factory restore. Now all has been well for a few days. But based on past experience I am not optimistic. Maybe it will be ok. Maybe not. Is it my fault? Is it the router? Or is the problem with the server? If its the server, is it the software or the hardware? I am curious as to whether my experience is unique or is it common. Have other WHS users had these problems or is it just me?

[server person]

server person, on Jul 4 2008, 10:18 PM, said:

The HP guys also tried to place the blame on my router so I have already replaced it. The router works just fine for everything except for my server. I keep losing the connection between my server and my network. When that happens, I cannot get to the server with the console or with Remote Desktop Connection. Sometimes, I can ping it and sometimes I cannot. Discovery does not find it. I had previously identifed the problem as being related to the IP address. When using DHCP, sometimes the server's IP address would change. Then the new ip address would not match the ip address linked to the server name in the host file. I still don't really know why I need an entry in the host file but that is what HP always advises to fix a connection problem. Anyway, because of the changing ip address problem with DHCP, I used Remote Desktop Connection to access the server. Then I set it up for static ip. That solved my problems for awhile. But when I tested PC restore to be sure it worked, the PC restore software could not find the server. I set the server back to DHCP and then the PC restore could find the server. So then I left the server on DHCP and got a new router that had DHCP reservation. I reserved a DHCP address for the server that matched the host file entry. Finally, at last, or so I thought, my connection problems were solved. But that was not to be. After a few days, I again lost the connection to the server. I could ping it sporatically but could not connect. Nothing worked. So I again did a factory reset. All was well for a few days. Then again I lost the connection. After trying everything else, I did a factory restore. Now all has been well for a few days. But based on past experience I am not optimistic. Maybe it will be ok. Maybe not. Is it my fault? Is it the router? Or is the problem with the server? If its the server, is it the software or the hardware? I am curious as to whether my experience is unique or is it common. Have other WHS users had these problems or is it just me?

I give up. My MSS has gone off line again. I have lost my connection. For the guy who does not know what that means, it means I cannot connect from any of my computers to my server. I can sporadically ping the server but cannot connect. I cannot connect using the home server console, using remote desktop, or using web connect. My router is still working fine so I don't think you should blame the router. I lost the connection while trying to copy a large video file to the server. It had been running ok for about 4 days. Whenever I have encountered this problem in the past, the only solution has been to do a factory restore. The problem, I think, must either be a bad hard drive or a bad NIC. Once again, I would like to know whether my problem with my server is unique to me or whether it is a common problem.

[Darkone]

dakn, on May 19 2008, 05:48 AM, said:

Hi Darkone, Yes I've tried rebooting :) I've no idea how it happened, I just happened to notice checking the storage pool because like I said; all my files are still available as normal so the drive still must be pooled.
What's the server recovery?

Would you mind trying this? Unplug your router (turn it off) for say two minutes, then plug it back in, give it fifteen minutes and try to connect. If you still can not connect reboot your computer, not the MediaSmart Server.

Thanks

[server person]

Darkone, on Jul 7 2008, 02:41 PM, said:

Would you mind trying this? Unplug your router (turn it off) for say two minutes, then plug it back in, give it fifteen minutes and try to connect. If you still can not connect reboot your computer, not the MediaSmart Server.

Thanks

Thanks, Darkone, your advice worked. I turned off my PC and unplugged my router. I left the router unplugged for 20 minutes. Then I plugged the router back in and started up my PC. Much to my surprise, it connected to the server.

I have been blaming my server for a problem that might be with the router. I had ruled out the router as the source of the problem because my router was working correctly for all other purposes. I could connect other devices and search the internet without any problem. Nevertheless, for some reason that I have not identified, I could not connect to the server. I have set the server and router to DHCP but I reserved the server"s IP address so that the router would not give the server a new ip address and would not give the server's ip address to another device. This should have kept the server name and ip address consistent with the information in the host file. I have considered the possibility that perhaps the router was overheating but, if that was the case, I would expect it to malfunction for other devices, not just for the server.

So, Darkone, I hate to admit that I was wrong but apparently I was.

I don't know whether you just made a lucky guess or whether you have some expertise about routers. If the latter, perhaps you could tell me why you think unplugging the router for 20 minutes could have fixed my problem. My router is a D-Link DGL-4100. As noted, I used DHCP reservation for my server's ip address.

[Darkone]

server person, on Jul 7 2008, 11:37 AM, said:

Thanks, Darkone, your advice worked. I turned off my PC and unplugged my router. I left the router unplugged for 20 minutes. Then I plugged the router back in and started up my PC. Much to my surprise, it connected to the server.

I have been blaming my server for a problem that might be with the router. I had ruled out the router as the source of the problem because my router was working correctly for all other purposes. I could connect other devices and search the internet without any problem. Nevertheless, for some reason that I have not identified, I could not connect to the server. I have set the server and router to DHCP but I reserved the server"s IP address so that the router would not give the server a new ip address and would not give the server's ip address to another device. This should have kept the server name and ip address consistent with the information in the host file. I have considered the possibility that perhaps the router was overheating but, if that was the case, I would expect it to malfunction for other devices, not just for the server.

So, Darkone, I hate to admit that I was wrong but apparently I was.

I don't know whether you just made a lucky guess or whether you have some expertise about routers. If the latter, perhaps you could tell me why you think unplugging the router for 20 minutes could have fixed my problem. My router is a D-Link DGL-4100. As noted, I used DHCP reservation for my server's ip address.

At one time I was a Microsoft MVP and I was awarded that for helping people connect Pocket PCs to wireless access points in part. So I suppose some might say I have a little knowledge. So far what we have done strongly suggest that the problem is in the router. What version of the firmware are you running in your D-Link DGL-4100?

[server person]

Darkone, on Jul 7 2008, 04:50 PM, said:

At one time I was a Microsoft MVP and I was awarded that for helping people connect Pocket PCs to wireless access points in part. So I suppose some might say I have a little knowledge. So far what we have done strongly suggest that the problem is in the router. What version of the firmware are you running in your D-Link DGL-4100?

It sure sounds like you are well qualified. And I agree that the problem is probably with my router. The firmware version is 1.7, which is the latest version. I have enabled DHCP reservation and have reserved an IP address for the server that matches the information contained in the host file. I did one other thing that I do not really understand. The router has an advanced feature called routes list which I have enabled. I put in the server's ip address as the destination and the metric as 10. I don't really understand the purpose of the routes list. When I called D-Link technical support for an explanation, the technician could not explain it to me.

I think the problem might be as simple as an overheated router. When I unplugged the power cord from the router and then plugged it back in after 20 minutes, my connection problem was solved. The only thing that causes me to suspect that the problem is NOT overheating is that the router was still functioning for all other purposes except for connecting to the server. I was able to connect to all other computers on the LAN and to the internet. I guess it is possible that an overheated router could have stopped connecting to the server but continued to work for other purposes. But that seems unlikely.

One other thing that might be relevant. I set up static ip for all devices on the LAN, except for the server. I left the server on DHCP because I could not get PC restore to find the server when it was set to static ip. I figured that DHCP reservation would be just as good as static ip but will still permit the PC restore software to find the server.

In any event, if you could share your knowledge about this issue, I would really be greatful.