[geeks] Dell sale on T105 Server

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Jul 1, 2009, at 12:23 , J. Alexander Jacocks wrote:

> Lionel Peterson <lionel4287 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Just a heads-up for anyone thinking about a nice, small Virtual
>> Machine hosting box, Dell is having a pretty good sale on their T105
>> Server.
>
> How loud is this server, and how piercing is the note given off by the
> fans?  Obviously 2 folks here are running these at home, but I live in
> a single-floor house, so noise is annoying, everywhere.  I'd even like
> to be able to work in my office, where the machine would live, if
> possible.
>
> I'm somewhat more noise-sensitive than most other 15 year IT veterans,
> so forgive me if my questions sound silly.

The machine with a dual-core CPU and 4GB of RAM is almost noiseless.

If you get quad core and 8GB of RAM, the main fan starts to spin  
faster, but it's never loud.  Most of the noise you hear is the blades  
and airflow going into the case.  I can't hear any fan motor noise at  
all.

It uses a central 120mm fan so it isn't a screamer.  The power supply  
is pretty much silent.  The air path is straight through over the CPU.

You can also add a drive bay fan for $35.  Dell only ships it if you  
buy the SAS controller, stating the fan is for the controller.

That's a little silly because the drive bays benefit greatly from the  
"controller fan". My drive temps dropped way down so even Dell's  
inflated $35 for the fan was well worth it.

On Solaris, I installed drivers for power saving.  That made the  
system quieter because my machine is frequently idle during the day  
with a fairly bursty load.  Most of the time the CPU drops to 1GHz and  
memory and CPU temps drop enough to allow the fan to slow down  
considerably.

You can get the same stuff for FreeBSD and Linux, not sure about others.

-- 
"Where some they sell their dreams for small desires."