jerry1234
New Member
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- Location
- SF Bay Area
Hello,
The new Dell T110 II arrived yesterday. NICE little machine. A little taller than the Dell desktop I had doing the job, but smaller than the Antec P183 case I used for my last Windows build.
The interior design is very slick. Very neat inside. Totally tool-less. The four internal drives are held in plastic frames with rubber mounted pins that match the drive screw holes. You just spread the frame, slide in the drive, and snick the pins into the holes. Then slide the frame into the chassis. The SATA cables are precisely sized and routed. Actually, the cable for drive 0 was just a little short - you could see it almost "stretching" between the drive and the motherboard, making the connectors "tilt" a bit. But it works.
There are no legacy PCI slots, all four slots are PCIe. So I had to buy a PCIe Ethernet card for the required second port. Forty bucks for the cheapest trustworthy card on Newegg. There is no 8-lane PCIe slot. So you can't use a fire-breathing video card. Which is a non-issue for a server anyway.
The included power cord was a monster. Very long and very thick. Looked like it would be right at home powering a rack in a data center. I didn't even unpack it, used a smaller modular cord I had laying around.
When I powered up the machine, the fan was loud. "Uh-oh, did I make a mistake buying this thing?" But after the OS ( Linux slackware 14.0 ) booted up, it quieted right down. I guess the variable speed fan defaults to "full speed" before software turns it down. It's Dell's usual practice - a passive heatsink on the CPU and a plastic shroud going to a fan on the back panel.
It came to me with 8 gigs of RAM. I assumed that they had put in four 2-gig DIMMS, and in order to upgrade I would have to discard them. Pleasant surprise: there were two 4-gig DIMMS. So I get to upgrade to 16 gigs without discarding anything. On Order.
I had prepared a pair of drives with the OS and business data. Put them in, pressed the power button - and it just came up, no fuss no muss. With the exception that the OS for some reason decided that there were three Ethernet cards: eth0 was (huh? nonexistant card), eth1 was the plug-in Broadcom card, and eth2 - the internal motherboard port.
- Jerry
The new Dell T110 II arrived yesterday. NICE little machine. A little taller than the Dell desktop I had doing the job, but smaller than the Antec P183 case I used for my last Windows build.
The interior design is very slick. Very neat inside. Totally tool-less. The four internal drives are held in plastic frames with rubber mounted pins that match the drive screw holes. You just spread the frame, slide in the drive, and snick the pins into the holes. Then slide the frame into the chassis. The SATA cables are precisely sized and routed. Actually, the cable for drive 0 was just a little short - you could see it almost "stretching" between the drive and the motherboard, making the connectors "tilt" a bit. But it works.
There are no legacy PCI slots, all four slots are PCIe. So I had to buy a PCIe Ethernet card for the required second port. Forty bucks for the cheapest trustworthy card on Newegg. There is no 8-lane PCIe slot. So you can't use a fire-breathing video card. Which is a non-issue for a server anyway.
The included power cord was a monster. Very long and very thick. Looked like it would be right at home powering a rack in a data center. I didn't even unpack it, used a smaller modular cord I had laying around.
When I powered up the machine, the fan was loud. "Uh-oh, did I make a mistake buying this thing?" But after the OS ( Linux slackware 14.0 ) booted up, it quieted right down. I guess the variable speed fan defaults to "full speed" before software turns it down. It's Dell's usual practice - a passive heatsink on the CPU and a plastic shroud going to a fan on the back panel.
It came to me with 8 gigs of RAM. I assumed that they had put in four 2-gig DIMMS, and in order to upgrade I would have to discard them. Pleasant surprise: there were two 4-gig DIMMS. So I get to upgrade to 16 gigs without discarding anything. On Order.
I had prepared a pair of drives with the OS and business data. Put them in, pressed the power button - and it just came up, no fuss no muss. With the exception that the OS for some reason decided that there were three Ethernet cards: eth0 was (huh? nonexistant card), eth1 was the plug-in Broadcom card, and eth2 - the internal motherboard port.
- Jerry
