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Dell PowerEdge 2500SC
The Dell PowerEdge 2500SC server arrived
via UPS today. It weighs 99 lbs. in its box. Damn near killed myself getting
it up to my loft. The thing is built like a tank.
I thought I was paying a couple hundred dollars extra by buying Dell, compared
to just buying the separate parts from online discount vendors. But I was wrong.
The Dell is a deal. The extra money got me an industrial strength case
with six bizillion fans (enough air movement to cool my room in the summer time),
redundant hot swap power supplies, six hot swap hard drive spaces and the most
beautifully laid out interior of a computer I've ever seen.
Instead of a jumble of ribbons which is what my home-built systems look like,
the Dell has one ribbon, nicely folded into the cooling duct (!) that is removed
through thumb screws! Plus, as far as I can know, the Dell is the only computer
with a ServerWorks HE-SL chipset motherboard that supports 6 DIMM slots. That
means I can buy lower density, cheaper memory without worrying about using up
all the slots.
Dell makes a lot of their money off memory and hard drives and options. I ordered
a fairly minimal configuration and planned on adding memory and SCSI drives
myself.
Installing extra memory (Crucial is excellent!)
was a cinch so I'm now up to over 1GB of SDRAM. That was an easy upgrade. Waaaaaay
cheaper than buying memory through Dell.
I was going to add a couple hard drives for the RAID array too but here's the
catch. Ha! There's always a catch. The computer doesn't include the hot swap
drive carriages, so it's not just a matter of buying the drives from say Googlegear
for cheap and plugging them in. Tomorrow I've got to call the spare parts division
at Dell to see if they sell the carriages. If not, or if they're expensive,
then I guess I'll have to buy the hard drives from Dell at about a $100 markup
per drive. This is not too bad considering things are less likely to go wrong
this way.
A secret about the 2500SC. It's about $500 less than the 2500 model. What does
the extra $500 get you if you decide on the non-SC model? It's "certified"
for clustering. There's also the option to rack mount the 2500 for several hundred
dollars more. That's it. Same machine otherwise, supposedly.
I was pretty proud of myself today at having the will power to eat lunch first
before opening the box and geeking out all afternoon. "Ooooh, two level
motherboard!"
Now, it's a matter of getting FreeBSD to recognize the Perc3/Di RAID controller
in this monster... I haven't had any luck so far.
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