[geeks] FYI - Low cost Dell Opteron Servers

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Mar 25, 2008, at 17:41 , Lionel Peterson wrote:

> Depending on what you want to boot off of, there is an IDE  
> controller, so you could add an IDE -> Compact Flash adapter[0] and  
> boot off a CF card, leaving two (or three) HD bays without touching  
> the floppy bay. For further expansion, I'd look to eSATA - I just  
> saw some nice IOGear SATA controllers (PCI Express 1x, 2 port  
> external and they support port multipliers) for about $35 at  
> microcenter.com[1][2].

I took the plunge and ordered one with the low end CPU and 4GB of RAM,  
and the DVD-ROM (I assume it isn't a writer, wonderful if it is).

Newegg has far better prices on the high end 12xx CPUs, so I'll wait  
and upgrade that later.

I have thought about booting from flash, just not sure I want to go  
that route.  For one thing, fast and reliable flash is expensive in  
decent sizes.  We use flash primary drives for the systems at work.

The only issue I can think of is I don't know how well Solaris runs  
from flash as I had thought of using that OS instead of FreeBSD.

Plenty of time to work all that out of course.

This server is actually too big for my computer shelf, but I'll find  
some way to put it in place.

-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com