sundance-communications.com/forum Forums Other TDM Phone Systems ESI Telephones & Systems How many HDD's have you replaced???

Only after replacing yet another bad HDD last week im realizing a pattern here. I have had to replace nearly 10 HDD's all in vintage ESI systems and 90% pretty much an E-Class. Its happening usually during the customers 5th year which luckily enough in all cases still covered under the 5 year warranty.

I have left ESI for the past two years but am contracting with an old company at the moment that is an ESI dealer. Last I talked to my good ol' buddy Chris Harris at ESI he mentioned that none of the new stuff is HDD and all Flash card. Its about damn time...

I have worked on one comm server since comming back to phones and it looks like an ESI X-class or 600. Both of those ran an HDD and in the 600 had the option of mirrored HDD's. Is it safe to assume that all the comm servers have an flash card?

Anyway, the question remains... how many HDD's have you seen go bad since you've been installing ESI? I have been installing ESI since the Original IVX and have over 100 systems between CA, Oregon, and Denver under my belt.

Very, very few here....i've been selling them since 2003.

I've been putting them in since 2001 and have only replaced two harddrives, one on a 72e and one on a IVX 20 plus.

Just of the top of my head I can remember replacing 5 HD's in the IVX20 & 1 in a IVX128. I have yet to replace any in an E-Class and I keep a careful eye on a 42s I have out there with a rare HD.

I certainly see a lot of 128's on Ebay advertised as "working when removed". Those buyers I consider to be future customers.

i noticed on the 72e's i put in in 05 & 06 there is a slot for the compact flash, if these systems HD goes bad, I wounder if you can just disconect the ribbon cable & stick in a CF card ?

Yes I have done that

We probably replaced a couple a year over the past 3-4 years. As many new as old.

Unless something has changed recently, the 1000, 600 and the 24 port VM model of the 200 are all still hard drive based and have mirrored drives available. The 1000 comes with mirrored memory standard.

Wow, that is unusual to me. I only sold their Voiceworks and Voiceworks16 voice mail systems. I still have plenty out there that were installed in the early 90's. I can say with certainty that I've replaced no more than five drives since then, with the most recent one in a VW16 being a HDD replacement with a flash drive. That ain't a bad track record in my books.

Man, I sure wish they still made those things.

Good feedback. Now I dont feel so alone as it seems like a common thing. I wish the HDD's ESI used would be more reliable but I guess when you've got a lot of systems out there then one would expect more cases of trouble.

I have an old 72e feature set 2 that just had its HDD replaced last year. Im hesitating on reselling it though.

I love ESI and im going to continue to push them. Even over my beloved Nortel and Avaya systems. ESI is just to easy!


Yeah, great 3rd party VM solution back in the day. I only installed a couple of these because the is pretty much when ESI took a turn in the right direction releasing the 20 and 128 platforms both with integrated VM. The price to have a phone and vm box on a user desktop back then was rediculously cheap if you went ESI. I think it was just at $150 on avg. Compared to an Avaya solution.

I'm glad to see that we are not the only ones having an unusually high failure rate on ESI hard drives and ESI equipment in general. ESI tries to tell us that we are the only ones having this high failure rate. We have had many hard drive failures over the past 7+ years. We have even had at least 3 or 4 Flash Card failures. In all of my 23 years in the Telephony business I have never seen a Flash card go bad in any phone system.