Dell T110 Motherboard suitable?

[pfennigcat]

The Dell T110 can be had right now for $378 with a Xeon processor (roughly equivalent to an i5), 4gb ram, GbE, **IPMI**, and room for 6 disks (if you put two in 5.25" bays).  I confirmed with Dell tech support that there were actually 6 SATA connectors on the mobo, so all the bays can be used.  The network chip is a Broadcom 5722.

 

Does anyone see anything that would obviously rule this out for unRAID usage?  It seems like a good low cost easy system for an unRAID plus license.  It is a server, so it will probably be noisier than a custom built system, but if it's in an out-of-the-way location that's not a problem.

[Rajahal]

a Xeon processor (roughly equivalent to an i5)

Xeon's tend to be pretty power hungry, I think it is a bit of a stretch to compare it to an i5.  In terms of speed they may be similar, but speed doesn't really matter with unRAID. 

 

If you don't mind the extra power consumption and the extra noise (which you mentioned) then no, I don't see any obvious problems.

[BRiT]

Raja, that's not entirely true. It all depends on the particular Xeon line.

 

The older Xeon X3220 were identical to the mainstream Q6600 but with slightly lower power consumption and TDP afforded by stricter binning process. In the Dell T110 case, the socket is identical LGA1156, which includes the following cpus: Celeron G1101, Pentium G6950, Core i3, Core i5, Core i7, and Xeon X3400 series processors.

 

The Intel X3450 is a 95 Watt Lynnfield 2.6Ghz Quad Core [ http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=42929&processor=X3450&spec-codes=SLBLD ], which is nearly identical to the Intel Core i5 750, a 95 Watt Lynnfield 2.6Ghz Quad Core [ http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=42915&processor=i5-750&spec-codes=SLBLC ] as both are made on the 45nm node. The difference is the X3450 has HyperThreading enabled so it shows up as 8 cores and some minor tweaks to what features are enabled.  They are both 95 Watt TDP.

 

Also to note, the Intel Xeon X3460 [ http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=42931 ] is equiv to the Intel Core i7 860 [ http://ark.intel.com/Product.aspx?id=41316 ], with both having hyperthreading enabled for 8 cores total with a 95 Watt TDP.

[Kaygee]

Good price for that spec. 50W idle and 150W with 8 cores running.

 

The only issue I can see is with the onboard storport S100 SATA controller. It seems to use broadcom software raid driver which may or may not work. Speak to Dell and ask them what the actual controller is. If it is just an option ROM for and Intel ICH model it will be fine as long as it can run as AHCI.

 

Can't see the NIC being an issue 5722 is pretty standard server NIC and v. good too.

[Rajahal]

Thanks BRiT, I learn something new every day on these forums.