[geeks] Dell sale on T105 Server

[Lionel Peterson]

On Jul 1, 2009, at 4:23 PM, Shannon Hendrix <shannon at widomaker.com>  
wrote:

> On Jul 1, 2009, at 15:11 , Lionel Peterson wrote:
>
>>> 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.
>>
>> I understand it is a rather plain fan, and in theory a standard  
>> fancould be used. I think the part number is F6Y6, but I'm not  
>> positive (GIYF)[0]
>
> It's actually an odd thickness, and it requires a shroud for the  
> case to fit and work properly.
>
> You can find the bare fan elsewhere, but it is useless without the  
> shroud.

Good to know, I'll probably order one just to have it...

>> You can put in a better SATA controller if you like, there are PCI- 
>> Express and one PCI (32 bit) slots.
>
> One question though: would the better SATA controller and its drives  
> be seen by the BIOS so you can boot from them?

Dell sells upgraded controllers that are bootable, so I can't see  
there being any limitation as you mention.

>> Very nice for modest needs
>
> Kind of funny to say "modest" when talking about a system with 4  
> fast CPU cores and 8GB of RAM.  I remember when that was a million  
> dollar machine.

Well, my newest machine has two quad Opterons, 16 Gig with slots for  
4x4G more, redundant PS, and four hard-wired drive bays. The Dell  
T605, it was $1,200 delivered. I'm gonna shove 4x 1TB drives in it and  
have a VM Monster Box.

> The biggest limit is the built-in drive I/O, which you can fix with  
> expansion cards, but you'll end up spending far more than the rest  
> of the system to get the I/O to balance
> the CPU and memory.

I hadn't really looked into it, but drive performance 'seems' OK...

> I run a lot of parallel compression jobs, and some other multi-core  
> stuff, and a lot of the software running in parallel can saturate  
> the drives even with very little CPU usage per core.

I play with a handful of VMs, and it is great to set up a three or  
four VM test environment in a matter of minutes...

> It's just not really worth spending the money just to shorten a few  
> jobs that run like that.
>
> At least... not yet... :)

Give it time...

As I said, I like it, and apparently a few here agree with me ;^)

Lionel