I've managed to acquire a fairly new (less than two months power-on time) Dell PowerEdge T110 server.  It has a Xeon X3440 Quad Core 2.53GHz CPU, 4GB ECC DDR3, Perc s100 integrated SATA, and 2x 250GB WD RE3 drives in RAID0.  Onboard Matrox video and single NIC.

 

Not sure what to do with it since the motherboard is proprietary and most likely will not fit in another chassis.  The Dell chassis has four 3.5 bays and three 5.25 bays so most can get for storage is nine hard drives.  Should I break it down and part it out or is there other possibilities I am not considering?

 

http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/t110_spec_pt.pdf

 

Load it up with 16GB of RAM and use it as an ESXi host.  I have two of them doing just that.

Unfortunately I haven't been bitten by the ESXi bug and do not have any idea what I would use VMs for.  I might list it in the buy/sell area as a complete system or parts.  The LGA1156 Xeon x3440 CPU could come in handy for someone.

Unfortunately I haven't been bitten by the ESXi bug and do not have any idea what I would use VMs for.  I might list it in the buy/sell area as a complete system or parts.  The LGA1156 Xeon x3440 CPU could come in handy for someone.

 

If you don't think you'd want to use ESXi then there really isn't any point in using that level of hardware for a simple unraid server. That CPU is pretty power hungry just to power a plan old NAS. I would sell it then.

I have a T110. Was considering turning it into a secondary media server + single VM with unraid but looking online it seems like the SATA controller is limited to under 2TB. Can someone confirm or deny?

 

 

I don't have the T110 anymore so cannot verify, but several searches on Dell forums for T110 resulted in the onboard SATA controller supporting 2TB max.

Thank you. That was what I found as well but was hoping that maybe a update BIOS update had expanded that.