[geeks] Dell sale on T105 Server

[Shannon Hendrix]

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.

> 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?

> 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.

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 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.

It's just not really worth spending the money just to shorten a few  
jobs that run like that.

At least... not yet... :)


-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com