Dell Poweredge 1950 & 2950 server(s) questions. Who has experience with these?

[tankman1989]

I have the opportunity to pick up 5 Dell Poweredge 1950's and 1 2950 for what looks like a very good price and I thought these might come in handy for mastering my server admin skills and use in a new office. I have no experience with these and I can't find out any hardware specs for them prior to the sale. I can locate the serial number/service tag but when I go to the Dell site and look up the tag number there is no hardware data associated with the machine.

Can anyone give me any insight as to what I might expect performance wise with these machines? How long ago did these models look like this (time frame). Thanks!

 

[onetech4all]

Re:

Here is what I have at my full time job:
PowerEdge 2950
8 CPUs x 2.826 GHz
Intel Xeon CPU E5440 @ 2.83 GHz
16 GB of RAM (this was obviously upgraded!

I think we have a RAID 1 in them of about 500 Gigs. Could be wrong about the hard drives. We got 3 of these and they run our VMware environment.
Hope it helps a bit!
About time frame, they are not the newest, could be 2-3 years old. I think

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Good little units.....I used some 1950's as game servers, and some 2950's as servers at some clients. One note...the 2950 is a freaking screamer...you'll see complaints all over, the fans never settle below 50%..they picked an odd temp controller for that model. Usually deployed in cabinets in data centers so noise never matters but one client I have has one of those 2950's in an office...and it's LOUD!

 

[coffee]

Concerning dell, I have always found that they are firmware hell. The perc controller cards I dont really care for either. I remember them as a high failure rate. But watch, Someone will chime in "Ive had a perc card for over 5 years and never had a problem".

I dont really care for dell since I had a problem with one of their tape libraries. I replaced the drive and found out that it needed a firmware upgrade and the firmware would not take. Also some problems with motherboards and firmware. But thats just my experience. I suppose that they would 'do'. But you have to keep up on them.

 

[mraikes]

Wikipedia has a nice Poweredge timeline, including basic specs for the various models:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dell_PowerEdge_Servers


Basically you're looking at 2006-2007 timeframe.