The new server

Dell PowerEdge 440Like I posted earlier, Dell’s sale on their low range servers piqued my interest in messing around with a server again.

These are the details on the server:

  • PowerEdge SC440
  • Dual Core Intel® Pentium®E2180, 2.0GHz, 1MB Cache processor
  • 800MHz FSB
  • 4GB DDR2, 667MHz, 4X1GB Dual Ranked DIMMs memory
  • 80GB 7.2K RPM Serial ATA Hard drive

All that for $299, plus shipping charges. The base configuration only had 1gb of ram. Since I work with WebSphere Portal and wanted to use this as a test server, I upgraded to 4gb of ram. It was only $100 and anyone who has worked on portal knows how much it likes server memory. The more the merrier.

It is similar to the one reviewed here: http://www.trustedreviews.com/networking/review/2006/12/26/Dell-PowerEdge-SC440/p1.

It has a nice metal case and is quiet while running. It would not make a good desktop pc as it has limited PCI slots and you would not be able to put a good video card in it.  But for what I want to do, a play/test server, it is perfect.  You really can’t beat the price for server quality hardware.

The only area it was lacking is in the storage department.  To solve that issue I went over to newegg and picked up two Western Digital 1 terabyte drives.  They have been installed in a RAID 1 configuration so I have a terabyte of (reasonably) worry free storage.

December 14th, 2008 in Technology