In June 2008 I received a Dell PowerEdge T105 server to run in my home for a client [1]. That system has run well for over 5 years for the purposes of my client and also as my own home fileserver and as a workstation. But now it’s getting a bit old, while it was still basically working the cooling fans were getting noisy, faster systems are available, and it was crashing occasionally which could have been due to hardware or software.
On the 7th of November I got a new Dell PowerEdge T110. It’s got a i3-3220 CPU (speed of 4218 according to cpubenchmark.net) which is a lot better than the AMD 1212 (speed of 982). It takes up to 4*3.5″ SATA disks (as opposed to 2 disks) and has more options for memory expansion. Next time I run out of disk space I’ll add another RAID-1 pair of disks instead of buying new disks.
Generally this system is much the same as the one it replaces. It’s a cheap server which unfortunately lacks sound hardware and usable video hardware. Sound is a problem I already solved with USB speakers but for the new system I bought a PCIe video card. Fortunately the system has PCIe*16 sockets (which apparently only have PCIe*8 wires) which avoids the problem I had in the past trying to obtain a suitable video card.
The crashes turned out to be due to BTRFS and now that I’ve made some tweaks everything is running well.
I’ll probably buy another Dell PowerEdge in about 5 years time.
Can you comment on noise level and amount of power draw?
It is very quiet. I have two wine fridges (cooled by Peltier devices) in the same room, each fridge makes significantly more noise than the server.
I haven’t measured power drawn, as the system only has a single PSU it will be inconvenient to do so and I might not do it for a while.
Man, that sounds pretty sweet. I really want one now!