Carl’s Blog

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I got one of these in for a customer the other day, and since the T300 overview proved popular, I thought I should take some photos of this one too.

Overall it seems a little bit smaller than the T300. Similar weight, slightly lighter. Initial feelings are that it’s a slightly cut cost version of the T300, but in reality everything is just fine. There are more flexible/cheaper processor options, Core i3 replacing dual-core Xeon x33xx of before, and this machine now uses DDR3 memory (ECC as usual).

Noise level is about the same as the T300.

There’s no LCD text display any more.

There is now the option of a PERC S100 embedded/onboard software RAID 0/1, which I’m happy enough with since I was most often using the SAS6i/R with SATA disks before. What I haven’t been able to find out is whether the S100 is enabled in the BIOS even when a non-RAID specification is ordered. I like to buy the servers with a single disk, and buy my disks elsewhere. On this occasion I had to pay £70 for a second 250gb SATA disk from Dell. Ouch. Next time around I will chance it and see if the S100 is always there in the BIOS, since it is otherwise a no-cost option.

As far as slots go, the PCI-X has gone, and we now have physically 1x PCIe x16 slot, 2x PCIe x8 slots, and 2x PCIe x1, but actually they are wired as 2x PCIe x8, 1x PCIe x4 and 2x PCIe x1. Basically the x16 slot only works as x8 and one of the x8 slots only works as x4. This is all according to the printing on the PCB anyway. I haven’t actually read the published specs. All slots are PCIe 2.0.

Chipset is Intel 3420.

Maximum RAM is now 32gb over the T300’s 24gb.

There’s a fancy UEFI based “System Services” (F10 on bootup) Unified Server Configurator built into the ROM, which has a new OS Deployment option built in, so no need to boot from the Dell Installation / System Management DVD, except that the UEFI based OS Deployment tool still required that DVD to load/pre-install the OS drivers from, and also it didn’t seem to work for me anyway! I ended up doing this one just like all the other Windows installations that I do on Dell servers.

There seems to be space for an SD/MMC card reader in the back, not entirely sure what for, and it’s covered with a blank on my machine.

As with the T300, the non-hotplug configuration comes pre-cabled for four SATA drives.

There are now two USB A ports on the motherboard, for backup devices, or even for putting a USB flash disk/key inside the machine and leaving it in permanently.

Enjoy the photos..