Well, my Dell PowerEdge T410 finally arrived and it didn’t take long either. From order to my door (via 2nd day) was a bit more than a week.  The box was huge, just as big as my XPS box, but a bit bigger. The box size was 33 in x 24 in x 18 in and weighted in around 61 lbs. When I first saw it on my door step I nearly was in awe that it wasn’t a oversize freight box…

When I finally opened it, the usual dell box was inside along with all manuals and all the usual setup info. As you basically can tell, my setup was fairly limited, but it will do the job I want it to do plus more.

My config was as follows:

• PowerEdge T410 Chassis with upto 6 Cabled Hard Drives and Quad-Pack LED Diagnostics
• 8GB Memory (4x2GB), 1066MHz Dual Ranked RDIMMs for 2 Processor
• E5502 Xeon Processor, 1.86GHz 4M Cache, 4.86 GT/s QPI, TurboHT
• E5502 Xeon Processor, 1.86GHz 4M Cache, 4.86 GT/s QPI, TurboHT
• 160GB 7.2k RPM Serial ATA 3Gbps 3.5-in Cabled Hard Drive
• 160GB 7.2k RPM Serial ATA 3Gbps 3.5-in Cabled Hard Drive
• No Operating System
• iDRAC6 Express
• DVD-ROM, SATA, Internal
• Electronic System Documentation and OpenManage DVD Kit
• Add-in PERC6/i (SATA/SAS Controller) supporting 2 Hard Drives – RAID 1
• Power Supply, Non-Redundant 525W
• Power Cord, NEMA 5-15P to C14,15 amp, wall plug, 10 feet / 3 meter
• Business Hours (5X10) Next Business Day On Site Hardware Warranty Repair Plus 2Year Extended

I ordered 5 extra 1 TB HDs from newegg – Western Digital RE3 (WD1002FBYS). I used 4 in the system, then I kept the other one in a safe place just in case I one drive dies.  The install was really easy as well as the setup with the PERC 6/I card. The PERC card looks like a renamed LSI controller card, but I could be wrong. The full initialization took quite a number of hours, but when it was done I loaded the OS and started to move all my data from one server, to another via the network. I was getting around 25 MB per sec on avg during the move (1 Gbe connection).

During the transfer I dunno what happened, but my older server crashed hard. I tried to do a cold boot, but it kept on freezing. So then I unplugged the box and let it sit for around 5 minutes, checked all the cables (just to be sure) and then plugged it back in. The box has been up since 😛 …go figure

So in total I have 2.7 TB in a RAID 5 (for the data) array with 160 GB in a RAID 1 config (for the OS).

The sound of the server isn’t that bad, I would say its the volume of my current server with around 3 smaller fans. So I could say its around 35 db, but that could vary on the work load.

Overall, I am very satisfied with this config and I will update soon with around a week of ownership. Please feel free to take a look at the photos of the server.