Comparison of HP Z400 and HP Z420 Workstations

[mhs100]

Hi all,

My Company was first ordering HP Z400 Workstations last year for commercial use

but soon it decided to upgrade to HP Z420 WorkStations.

This is because within the period of 3 months 3 HP Z400 workstations were failed/crashed,

now HP Z420 Workstation is working fine so far.

I am looking for reasons why we have moved quickly to Z420 from Z400. Can anyone tell me the details and history of crashes of HP Z400? In the last year as i said we had at least three HMIs failing in the Z400 platform.

Any details on both the systems performances HP Z400 and HP Z420 ?

regards,

mhs100

P.S. this thread has been moved from Business PCs - Compaq, Elite, Pro to Workstations - z series, xw series, and legacy x and w series - HP Forums moderator

[dv411]

I am an HP VAR and systems integrator and delivered a number of Z400 and Z420 workstations to clients (along with Z8-series). First time I hear of persistent problems of Z400 systems.  Far as I know, there's no "history" of crashes or reliability issues.

Z420 wasn't introduced as a more reliable replacement for Z400; rather, a new model featuring current chipset and memory technologies. Other computers makers like D***, L***** and everyone else did the same.

Here is a short comparison between the two.

Hope this helps.

[mhs100]

Hi Alex,

Most of the complaints we received from different sites where HP Z400 workstaions are installed

were of the RAID I Hard Disks failures.

Do you have any information regarding this?

Thanks and Regards

[dv411]

---

@mhs100 wrote:

Hi Alex,

Most of the complaints we received from different sites where HP Z400 workstaions are installed

were of the RAID I Hard Disks failures.

Do you have any information regarding this?

---

I don't - the only RAID1 problem I've seen was on a Z200 where the boot RAID1 volume would result in long boot times of between 1 and 3 minutes.  The system's performance did not seem to be otherwise affected.

Do you have more data on the crashes and failures?  Specific error messages, including those in system logs, how often did they happen, any attempt to trouble-shoot or mitigate the issues?

[mhs100]

Hi Alex,

The actual problem which we are facing is that the computer starts slowing down, until we see an error in the Raid software in Windows then the Hard drive is reported failed. Once the hard drive (failed one) is removed, then the computer performs smoothly.

The fix is to replace the failing harddrive. We had this in three or four different locations.

Thanks and Regards

[joselso]

I have an HP Z820 with System SSD drive on LSI2308 (on-board chipset), and a pair of SAS 15000rpm data drives as RAID1 on LSI SAS 9260-8i (PCI-Express card) with BBU08 battery.

Naturally I am interested in your discussion on drive failures.

Were all failed drives of related drive/manufacture family?

Were they SAS, SATA or what?

Please provide some more informative details.

[dv411]

---

@mhs100 wrote:

The actual problem which we are facing is that the computer starts slowing down, until we see an error in the Raid software in Windows then the Hard drive is reported failed. Once the hard drive (failed one) is removed, then the computer performs smoothly.

The fix is to replace the failing hardier. We had this in three or four different locations.

---

The error in the RAID software - from Intel Rapid Storage Technology utility?

Have you tried disabling mirroring and instead using the extra drive for daily backups?  (Just to see if it's the RAID utility / configuration that's causing the problem?)

[mhs100]

Hi  Alex,

If i disable the mirroring, then what the use of having additional hard drive? PC is running smoothly

without additional hard drive but this is not the deal which HP approved for us. We must want RAID I feature.

You mean that Intel Rapid Storage Technology utility is causing to fail the hard drive?

Regards

[dv411]

---

@mhs100 wrote:

If i disable the mirroring, then what the use of having additional hard drive?

Backup including regular imaging.  Serves a different purpose vs. mirroring: mirroring is a recipe against downtime morethan data loss; imaging/backup - primarily data loss.  Reason being - mirroring doesn't protect again user errors which are the most common causes of data loss.

PC is running smoothly

without additional hard drive but this is not the deal which HP approved for us. We must want RAID I feature.

---

Just one system for trouble-shooting purposes.

You mean that Intel Rapid Storage Technology utility is causing to fail the hard drive?

---

I don't know, it's probably a more complex driver / OS / hardware issue. That's what it'd be good to trouble-shoot, change the configuration a bit, see what happens.