On Thu, Oct 20, 2005 at 04:26:31PM +0200, Brad Knowles wrote:
At 10:49 PM +1000 2005-10-20, Michael VInce wrote:
> The 4 ethernet ports on the Dell server are all built-in so I am assuming
> they are on the best bus available.
In my experience, the terms "Dell" and "best available" very
rarely go together.
Dell has made a name for themselves by shipping the absolutely
cheapest possible hardware they can, with the thinnest possible
profit margins, and trying to make up the difference in volume.
Issues like support, ease of management, freedom from overheating,
etc... get secondary or tertiary consideration, if they get any
consideration at all.
But maybe that's just me.
--
Brad Knowles, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
I think that's unfair.
I have a couple of Dell machines and my biggest complaint with them
has been
their use of proprietary bolt patterns for their motherboards and similar
tomfoolery, preventing you from migrating their hardware as your needs
grow.
This also guarantees that your $75 power supply becomes a $200 one
once the
warranty ends - good for them, not good for you.
Other than that, I've been pretty happy with their stuff. Sure beats a lot
of other "PC" vendors out there in terms of reliability, heat management,
BIOS updates, etc.
--
--
Karl Denninger ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Internet Consultant & Kids Rights
Activist
I have to agree Karl,
Those slots aren't proprietary there PCI Express.
When I went to open the machine up to put in a PCI multi serial card all
I saw were those little modern mean looking PCI Express slots which have
the ability to scare any techie, there are no old PCI slots on it, I had
to dump my serial card and change over to usb2serial converters by
loading the ucom and uplcom as kernel modules so I could use tip to
serial out of usb into the single serial port on the Dell machines when
the ethernet is down which ended up working out great, I will never need
clunky old (and price) multi port PCI serial cards again.
If you look at the chipset Intel E7520 of the Dell 1850/2850 (The 2850
is really just a bigger case machine to hold more drives)
http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/embedded/e7520.htm
You will see it just only has PCI Express as a minimum which is
64bit/133mhz which does a minimum of 2.5GBs/sec in 1 direction and its a
switched based bus technology where there is no sharing of the lanes,
there is no old school PCI 32bit/33mhz buses.
http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1087&page=3
As for service, I actually ordered two much smaller Dell 750's but
because there were out of them for a couple of weeks due to some big
company ordering 500 of them I had a bit of an argue with the Dell guy
on the phone and got 1850s with scsi raid 1 out of him for the same price.
Its been Dell that has shown me how good (and maybe a bit evil) big
companies can be.
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