Strange storage systems at Dell
I’m in the process of readying a brand new Dell Precision 7710. I’m close to completion. The only thing I’m missing is a driver for the nVidia Quadro M4000M GPU.
Downloading the driver named Video_Driver_VP6P0_WN32_10.18.13.6246_A02.EXE doesn’t complete. This file should be close to 347 MiB, but all I get is anything from 116 MiB to 230 MiB. After numerous attempts, far more than I care to count, I finally got the complete file.
Downloading the ISV Certified driver named 354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe doesn’t complete either. This file should be close to 276 MiB, but all I get is around 60 MiB.
All the other drivers for the 7710 was downloaded with no trouble at all. The same goes for downloads elsewhere. A 1.6 GiB ISO image for the FreeBSD/amd64 11.0-ALPHA2 preview was pulled from the German mirror without any hickups.
What’s so special about the ISV Certified GPU driver? Bad storage systems? Bad load balancers? Bad network?
Update 2016-06-09:
I did three new attempts this morning. For each attempt the download time kept decreasing.
$ fetch -avS 289656272 -T 300 http://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER03720742M/2/354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe looking up downloads.dell.com connecting to downloads.dell.com:80 requesting http://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER03720742M/2/354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe remote size / mtime: 289656272 / 1463683832 354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe 100% of 276 MB 696 kBps 06m45s $ fetch -avS 289656272 -T 300 http://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER03720742M/2/354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe looking up downloads.dell.com connecting to downloads.dell.com:80 requesting http://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER03720742M/2/354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe remote size / mtime: 289656272 / 1463683832 354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe 100% of 276 MB 3007 kBps 01m34s $ fetch -avS 289656272 -T 300 http://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER03720742M/2/354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe looking up downloads.dell.com connecting to downloads.dell.com:80 requesting http://downloads.dell.com/FOLDER03720742M/2/354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe remote size / mtime: 289656272 / 1463683832 354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe 100% of 276 MB 5162 kBps 00m54s
It looks like I finally nailed it. Here are Dell’s checksums for 354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe:
| MD5 | 99dcc85c1b618fe64a5a7e075f9ec74c |
|---|---|
| SHA1 | 6e7d5f8f9dda698a2ca173a89760093555b19869 |
| SHA-256 | 5ddb379b44d64717ae47ac8d24ab53e64ff8f0b5c6ba46cf9ae4f16492077680 |
Here are the checksums I gathered from the downloaded file:
$ md5 -r 354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe 99dcc85c1b618fe64a5a7e075f9ec74c 354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe $ sha1 -r 354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe 6e7d5f8f9dda698a2ca173a89760093555b19869 354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe $ sha256 -r 354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe 5ddb379b44d64717ae47ac8d24ab53e64ff8f0b5c6ba46cf9ae4f16492077680 354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe $ sha512 -r 354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe eb41ef4798a43d2bdccd0b2786c73eaae92e63170fdb21e50b755853108c94cddf30f2981912b895a83814c945d40689dee7c883383f72ecfadd84544742db60 354.56_W7-64_ZPE.exe