More Sun Silver Hardware, oh my...

So as it turns out, the last couple of weeks were spent poking at the newfangled V445 servers. Just like a V440, right? Wrong. Sure, faster CPU's, smaller package, SAS drives, cool silver look (gunning to be acquired by Apple, aren't you?), plus these handy features:

• Same RAID controller as the T series. Wipe the disks, disk label missing, jumpstarts go into swedish chef mode (bork bork bork)...
  
  
• Even lower quality control than the V440's. Do you throw them all off the back of a truck a couple of times to make sure? Re-seating everything in the case is not fun.
  
  
• The OpenBoot PROM is annoying - once it detects something as failed, and you clear the error, the system still boots with a warning message "The following devices have failed: " and list nothing. I guess you saved on that if statement.

In all fairness, all is not bad. It seems that the Sun-branded drives from Seagate are no longer quality-control rejects. At my last job, on a set of 30 V440's we were replacing two hard drives every month. Not officially, of course - it's all under non-disclosure... zzzzapp! What was that, oh, a cosmic ray made everything reboot...

NO CARRIER