Server RAID and USB key = bad?

[BadBrew]

So this is not a question about making a RAID array with USB keys...

A customer who I work for determined that USB thumb drives (or any other USB storage) was causing major boot time slowdowns because the RAID software was indexing what's on the USB key when inserted.

We're using different configurations for HP and IBM servers (RAID 1+0 or 1E, SAS or U320) with Win2003.
Yes, HP Array config utility and ServRAID software are loaded.

I am really sceptic about that one... especially when we've been using USB for over 7 years without problems...

 

[office politics]

hardware raid with usb sticks? this is possible? wow. I'd figure this could be done by setting up software raid from within disk manager in Windows server.

 

[kmote]

How often do they reboot their server? How much slower is it? Have they looked at any logs? What software is he talking about? What does he mean by indexing? Seems an unlikely story to me.

 

[BadBrew]

How often do they reboot their server? How much slower is it? Have they looked at any logs? What software is he talking about? What does he mean by indexing? Seems an unlikely story to me.

As I know of...
There's a lot of issues with DNS head servers (this is an extremely large network), so the servers are most of the time stuck on "Preparing Network Connexions" when we're adding a new server but that's a known issue that's been running for years...
I'm not aware of any other slowdowns other than network related (bad cisco config, bad firewall config, etc...)

I don't know the logs they are looking for, I have looked into dummy servers we have but I can't find any clues of an external storage being connected (indexed) whatsoever to the actual RAID config... Software used are HP's and IBM's RAID management utilities...

I hate being fooled that way, but can't do much against our customer except giving them proof that they are wrong...