Forum OpenACS Q&A: cheap Dell servers for next 4 days

Budget Dell Server - P4-2.4Ghz $269!, Mar 7

Dell has slashed Price on the 600SC, 1600 SC, 2600, 4600, 350, 1650, 2650 servers!

Dell Small Business has a good deal on a basic server. PowerEdge600SC P4-2.4Ghz/533Bus 128MB DDR/40GB 7200 IDE HD, 48x CD, Embedded Gigabit Ethernet, No OS 1yr on-site warranty $499 - $110 discount - 5% off coupon - $100 rebate = $269.55 shipped free.

Select Servers, Choose PowerEdge, Choose PowerEdge SC, Customize It on Middle config, 1.8 Celeron/IDE/No Raid - Continue, Select Free upgrade to P4 2.4/1-Yr Warranty/Keyboard/Mouse - Continue, Continue, Add to cart, Apply coupon: 8D2755970FD4

Includes 4 64-bit/33mhz PCI Slots, Serverworks Grand Champion SL chipset, up to 4GB ECC DDR SDRAM, 3 on board IDE Channels, 2 USB 1.1 ports, ATI Rage XL Video on board.

This machine lacks an AGP slot and on-board sound, other wise it would make a capable desktop.

I don't know where techbargains.com got that detailed description of the server components, as I didn't see that on the Dell site. But if it's accurate $270 sounds like a great deal to me. I ordered one for myself. :)

Ok. Final price is $416.23 & there is a $100.00 rebate included in the box. I called Dell to be sure. I suggest you do the same if you get one and get a name. 😉 So all in all not a bad little server for $316.23. Thanks for the tip on Crucial Don. I'm getting some extra memory from them.

Memory   
 
 128MB up to 4GB ECC DDR-266 registered SDRAM
 
Expansion Slots   

 5 Total PCI Slots
 
 4 x 64-bit/33MHz (Supports 3.3V cards)
 
 1 x 32-bit/33MHz (Supports 3.3V cards 

Ports   

 2 USB 1.1, 1 parallel, 1 serial, 1 video, 1 NIC, 1 PS/2 mouse, 1 PS/2 keyboard

Oh - shipping is free. Only additional payment was for taxes... Thanks for the heads up Andrew.

Yes, it was Dell, it took awhile to figure it out but the person who told me about the current low prices had told me the SCSI increment was only $100 more so I dug and dug through the site until I figured it out.

If you go to one of the main server pages and click on the 600 SC series, one path through there will land you on a page that has you check off your processor choice (P4 2.4 GHz) and disk drive type choice (IDE/SCSI/SCSI w/HW RAID)

The next page looks scary because it's in the $1K range.  But ...first you "upgrade" to the "P4 2.4 GHz at a 1.8 Celeron" ("price" is supposed to be there but the line's too long so it's truncated) "-$99"

That knock $99 off the price.

Then you knock off $348 for their cadillac three-year service option.

That gets you down to $599 - $110 discount - $100 mail-in rebate with free shipping.  $389.  Woo-hoo!

Then you add two $54 256 MB ECC DDR 2100 Registered RAM sticks from Crucial (I've never had any problem with Crucial memory though overclockers prefer Mushkin etc, I don't overclock) and Oracle and PG and everyone else runs happily ever after all on the same machine.

I'll probably add a second platter and RAID 1 the thing but Dell's add-on price for a second disk seemed high.  I have Fry's here ...

I'm going to migrate my world to this sucker and get rid of the P200, P350 and P500 systems with various 3GB, 6GB etc disks on which everything lives at present.  I'll give those away or sell them cheap.

I've been considering upgrading for about a year and being able to buy a sweet little box like this at this price sure beats scrambling for parts and building my own, not to mention there's no way I could beat the price.

Only caution is that the machine uses the ServerWorks CSB6 which has 3 IDE channels.  Not all the patches for the CSB6 latest revision are in Red Hat Linux so you won't see your third channel in the /proc filesystem and you won't be able to turn DMA on the 3rd channel (It works fine, but not in DMA.. the other two channels work with DMA). The CD-ROM is cabled to that channel.

The errata after the next release of Red Hat should contain the patches for the CSB6 to allow DMA on the 3rd channel.

You'll should see a price of $936. Choose the "P4 upgrade at 1.8 Celery price -$99" radio as mentioned above, choose the least expense support option (-$348) and you're at $489 plus a $100 mail-in rebate.

Good luck!

And don't post that link to Slashdot!!!!

I haven't investigated modern SCSI (my server's board is UWII, we've passed U160 and are at U320 or whatever) so the separate board may offer two channels or other high-end features you might need if you plan to add a half dozen 36 GB drives :)  Onboard SCSI usually offers one highspeed bus capable of handling 8 devices (but again I haven't checked in a long, lnog time) but in this case the tiny tower case rules against putting that much stuff in anyway.

Onboard SCSI has been the choice for rackmounts for years now along with onboard NIC.  The only thing missing is the external plug for adding external drives, but if you're looking for that much storage, you probably want a more robust server anyway (this one has four internal bays for drives, though using two is probably best for cooling purposes)

damn. :0

"According to memory manufacturer Corsair, a typical computer with 256MB of non-ECC memory has several memory errors every year. ECC memory, when properly used, eliminates this problem."

Thanks for the tips everyone.

-Roberto

The base discount is $80 today, whereas I think it was $110 yesterday -- the miracle of dynamic pricing, at work.

One person who bought a similar server recently found that it ran very hot and needed more/better fans.  He said this applies to a dual-processor capable system, which (to my surprise) is the case for the Serverworks Grand Champion SL motherboard.

Also the base discount's down to $60 ...

I suspect someone screwed up that web order page ...

If you take the $389 and add $299 you get $688 (after rebate etc)

On their site you can order a 1600SC - bigger box, dual-processor motherboard - with a 2.4 GHz Xeon (SMP capable)  with onboard SCSI and the 36 GB 10K disk for $699 (after rebate etc) which would be a better deal than the "you have to buy a $299 SCSI card!" rip and a non-dual motherboard.

And that page only shows $199 for a separate SCSI card *and* makes clear that "embedded SCSI" is the no-cost option.

Something's screwed up at Dell ...

There's one thing I don't get though.. Dell just sent me an e-mail that has an order number, but no customer number, and the totals for my order are all zeroes. And as far as the web site goes, I don't have an order yet.

Is that part of their "zero inventory" thing?

-Roberto

Good job.  With a few more customers like us they'll be swimming in red ink the next quarter :)

YEAH!

I'm still waiting for Dell to un-botch my order.  Bleh.  I just have no luck with Dell...  couple years ago I ordered a Lattitude from them, but when it still hadn't shipped after 5 weeks I cancelled.

The case is small, but looks very slick. No fans blowing directly over the hard drive area (which is a nifty feature of the nice $70 Chen-Ming 601 case on one of my other machines), but there are two big honking fans in there blowing air in and out. The one in the back is nearly 5 inches across, the fan in the front is smaller but looks somewhat bigger than the usual 80 mm size, maybe 90 or 100 mm. I don't think cooling will be a problem.

Running memtest86 on the paltry 128 MB (but registered ECC!) RAM from Dell shows 49 errors within the first minute or two, most almost immediately, then no additional errors over several hours. The power supply is only rated 250 W max and has only a single fan, so maybe it's a low quality unit, and responsible for the problems. Or maybe the RAM's just bad. Won't know till I try the real RAM for the machine.

The case is small, but looks very slick. No fans blowing directly over the hard drive area (which is a nifty feature of the nice $70 Chen-Ming 601 case on one of my other machines), but there are two big honking fans in there blowing air in and out. The one in the back is nearly 5 inches across, the fan in the front is smaller but looks somewhat bigger than the usual 80 mm size, maybe 90 or 100 mm. I don't think cooling will be a problem.

Running memtest86 on the paltry 128 MB (but registered ECC!) RAM from Dell shows 49 errors within the first minute or two, most almost immediately, then no additional errors over several hours. The power supply is only rated 250 W max and has only a single fan, so maybe it's a low quality unit, and responsible for the problems. Or maybe the RAM's just bad. Won't know till I try the real RAM for the machine.

My server, with the default 128MB RAM, runs memtest86 (tests 1 thru 7) without any errors at all, at least over the several passes that I've done so far.  I ran the tests after the machine had been up for several days straight.

What other tests are people running to smoke out any hardware problems?  I tried hdparm, but since I've got only a SCSI disk, there isn't much it can do.  I've built the linux kernel several times (just over 3 minutes -- sweet!) and have seen no glitches.

BTW, the "e1000" module code from Intel works fine with the onboard NIC.  I didn't manage to find any standard driver in the 2.4.18 kernel that would work.

I've emailed the guy who wrote/maintains memtest86, as I'm wondering if maybe the hardware is ok and memtest86 has some bug/interaction with it. Either way, it's awfully annoying, and argues against using PowerWedge servers. :(

Other than that, I guess it's possible that the cpu is bad, but that seems unlikely given the identical symptoms Jonathan reported, etc.

I have the same problem as you stated with memtest86 on my 600SC. I never tested the supplied memory that came with it as I had 2gb of ram waiting when it arrived.

The Crucial ram had similar problems running the check, but I said "what the hell" and loaded RedHat 8 anyway. Installation went without a hitch. I loaded 4.6.2 and had it installed with Postgresql and running the way I wanted in under 4 hours. Followed Joel's new instructions and left out the qmail part.

The machine for the past week has been stable and presents no problems. I'm thinking the error may be an incompatibility with memtest86 and Dell's hardware, but then again Dell could have been dumping hardware with known problems that had failed other tests, no one can know for sure, since we all seem to be seeing the same general errors.

Next week, after Easter I'll find another memtester and try again. But for now, I'm pleased with the 600SC, 2gb Ram, 4-40GB IDE HD's.

Here are some useful Dell PowerEdge 600SC related links I've collected: overclockers.com review, 2cpu.com review, Dell PowerEdge community forum Useful stuff like pointing out that the power supply connector is slightly non-standard (missing the 5 V line I think), the type of PCI cardsd the motherboard takes (newer "universal" 3 V only, no old 5 V cards), etc.

About the 600SC ethernet, on IRC Jade said: 'The eepro100 and e100 drivers didn't work. I had to download the e1000 drivers. eepro1000 might have worked, but they weren't in any of the kernels or install disks I had. It works now. If you're installing Debian on a 600SC though, you can go here (Intel) to get the driver.'

The conservative approach is to attach only one drive to each port no matter what, but I'm wondering if that's really unnecessary. I couldn't find any definitive answers by searching on Google. Anybody know for sure?

Unfortunately, I really don't have the time and inclination right now to actually set up my hardware both ways (shared vs. non-shared IDE bus) and collect some real benchmark data, so if that's the only way to get a definitive answer I probably won't, I'll just stick in a Promise Ultra100 TX2 two port PCI controller card.

Their prices seemed to the lowest at the time, so I bought mine at newegg.com. I've ended up buying a large percentage of my computer stuff at New Egg, they're a good vendor. techbargains.com is a good place to compare RAM prices. Sometimes Crucial's prices are actually the best but usually not.

My 600SC motherboard appears to have 4 64-bit PCI slots and no AGP slot, while the 400SC had 4 32-bit PCI slots and an AGP slot. Besides the obvious case differences, the the fans and heatsinks are also clearly different: The 400SC is described as usually having only one 92mm 0.68A fan at the back, and a passive heatsink on the CPU. My 600SC has a ~120mm 1.50A fan at the back, ~80mm 0.90A fan in the front, and a smaller 0.25A blower on the CPU.

At any rate, the P4 2.4 GHz configuration is the cheapest CPU with an 800 rather than 533 or 400 MHz front-side bus; minimum price for that configuration (1 small IDE drive, only 128 MB of Dells' usually-overpriced ECC RAM, etc.) is ($498 - $100 rebate) = $398.

Going with the cheapest Celeron 2.0 GHz 400 MHz FSB still only brings the price down to ($399 - $100) = $299, so I don't know where that advertised $179 price is coming from. Perhaps I missed something in Dell's configurator, or prices have changed since yesterday when the techbargains.com info/ad actually went up.