Reviewed by:GregHolmberg(read all my reviews) Location:
San Francisco bay area, CA, USA
Duration of product use:
Over a year
Level of expertise:
Expert
Title: A good entry-level server
Date: September 23, 2009
Product Uses: software development
Review:Pros: Good performance. Low price. Reasonable set of slot types. Fairly quiet. TPM chip for cryptographic key generation.
Cons Maximum of four drives, 8 GB RAM, 1 CPU. No sound. Very low-end graphics.
Review
I have the quad-core at 2.1 GHz, 4 GB RAM, two SATA drives, DVD, on-board NIC, no OS. I installed openSUSE 11.2 64-bit, and created a software RAID-0. Easy installation, all hardware supported out of the box with openSUSE.
I got this for developing enterprise software (Java, Eclipse, database), and it works great for that. The ECC memory ensures reliable operation, software RAID-0 is fast enough, multi-core lets me test my multi-threaded Java server. I like that Dell provides Linux drivers and BIOS updates that run under Linux (no DOS boot disk required).
I don't run it continuously (I only turn it on when developing), but it's been reliable so far. I've had it for over a year.
I haven't really pushed a lot of data through the on-board network card, so I don't know if it's slow as ClickCT reports. Certainly it's good advice in general to off-load TCP/IP processing to a smart NIC in a file or web server.
There are only four memory slots, so if you think you might someday expand beyond 4 GB, then get the high-density DIMMS (2 GB per). 800 MHz RAM is a little on the slow side by today's standards. 1067 would be more reasonable.
It would be nice if Dell added some eSATA ports on the back.
I'm pretty happy with this machine for my needs, and I would buy it again. At least in 2008 there wasn't much competition to the T105 at it's price-point.
Reviewed by:print1guy(read all my reviews) Location:
Austin, TX
Duration of product use:
Less than a month
Level of expertise:
Newbie
Title: smooth installation
Date: January 21, 2009
ProsFast. I thought our old server was fast (4 years old. This is great, right out of the box ConsNone on the server itself. You'd think migrating settings in the os would be simpler.
Review:The selection process of equipment was a painless, step by step process. I also liked the availability to check on the status of the build.
