Ooops my mistake.

And for those wanting the Xeon model it can be had here for £207 after cash back:

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/dell-poweredge-t20-tower-server-intel-xeon-e3-1225-v3-3-2ghz-4gb-ddr3-ecc-1tb-hdd-2429853

If you wanna run a VM lab.

If all you wanna do is serve up files, it'll be fine as it is ....

This was on offer last month for £70 (no HDD) after cashback so for extra £23 for 500gb HDD is still very good value.

Other than more RAM, anything else needed for use as a NetScaler lab?

This was on offer last month for £70 (no HDD) after cashback so for extra £23 for 500gb HDD is still very good value.

That pent should be a quad xeon. Shed loads mem (32gb max, udimms ) vsphere, more hdds and I'd heartily recommend a perc card and youll be set

If you wanna run a VM lab.

If all you wanna do is serve up files, it'll be fine as it is ....

Just bought one. Seems like a good deal to me.

any suggestion on a decent perc card to buy?

Got this running with Win7 media centre - quiet and plenty fast enough though I did add a GTx750Ti to run 4k video smoother :smiley:

depends what you want to do with it. Can't give any recommendations for any RAID card or HBA without more info as they all have pro's and con's.

Ilove this thing, wish id bought another in April. Got it down to 54gbo with flubit and cashback.

The thung dominates plex and transcodes to a multitude of devices without strain. Sonarr, deluge and them a filebot script hourly. Never struggles. Has 6tb of content on there currently.

How is this compared to the hp gen 8 microserver?

better expandability really more room for drives and will take a more modern CPU plus more RAM. More pcie slits also

slots

Will Mac OS X run on this? Ideally need to replace my G4 server as it's probably eating my leccy bill

The CPU seems strong enough for gaming, does anyone know whether this PC would support a GTX 960/950 or a 750ti?

More room for drives but only comes with 4xSata power connectors and 4xSata headers so you need expansion kit for more drives. hmm

Cheaper here

Ridiculously cheap, have a dollop of heat

I was going to go for a Microserver Gen8 as I already own an N36L & N40L until I noticed the Gen8 only has one PCIE slot which is a real deal breaker for me. The Dell has plenty and has a hard drive, plus it works out cheaper after cashback!

I fired in a gtx 750ti and had no probs. Running well. Just make sure you get one that's able to run happily without extra power and run by pcie alone.

How many 3.5" drives can u get in here? excluding a ssd os drive. Forget the 500gb

And a considerably better cpu.

http://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/macos-x-10-9-2-on-dell-t20.131793/

Doesn't seem so - not without significant technical knowledge so as to get it to work!

Even then, I would never recommend/use Hackintosh builds in a server environment.

I exclusively use Macs, but use a linux based server due to the fact that time machine backups still require AFP, which isn't supported on Windows (without very expensive commercial software). If you don't need time machine backups, you could just as easily use Windows Server. Will work perfectly well on the later versions of OS X (which have full Samba 3 implementation)

If you want one they are available but not at this price.More like £320+ after cashback.

You can use non-ECC RAM in this (and you can mix the supplied ECC with non-ECC)

And for those wanting the Xeon model it can be had here for £207 after cash back:

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/dell-poweredge-t20-tower-server-intel-xeon-e3-1225-v3-3-2ghz-4gb-ddr3-ecc-1tb-hdd-2429853

I bought the hdd-less one from last week, a great bit of kit. I'm thinking of buying 2 more to get a 3 esxi build and play with Vsan - is the Dell cashback limited to one per person or anything before I pull the trigger?
3 servers for less than £300 is unbelievable really, if you can do it :confused:

*********
Just read the Ts & Cs:
There is a maximum of 10 cashback claims and a maximum of 10 products, per person, company or household during a 3 month period. Cashback claims will be paid as one total amount, in one payment, directly into the claimants nominated Bank Account.

so it looks like I'm good to go.

Just bought one to replace a WHS box on its last legs.
Excellent VFM.

Not a problem if you're buying RAM but be aware this won't take RDIMMs just UDIMMS. I have a shed load of RDIMMs (4 and 8GB from server upgrades) and can't use any of them :disappointed:

I'm running nas4free on my Dell - v nice, v simple, AFP out of the box

Owner's manual on Dell's site (about 14MB):
http://topics-cdn.dell.com/pdf/poweredge-t20_owner's%20manual_en-us.pdf

Ooops my mistake.

I've got two HP N54L which each have 24TB Storage, I use for storage of all my HD and UHD Photography stuff.

I Was looking at another microserver to keep all my music and video media safe, however this looks worth considering.

Whats the gains over the N54L?, I read somewhere this can only store 13TB of drives which is odd.

The specs say it will house 4 drives but I wonder how many it will actually hold!, I have 7 drives in my N54L's including the SSD OS drive.

Nice - I wanted one of those before Christmas but went out of stock - can I sneak one of these past SWMBO? Unlikely.

Excellent question, wouldn't mind the answer to that question too thanx. :-)

Processor is not great.

It should have a proper server motherboard, ECC ram and a load of hard drives, but not at that priice it won't.

well it shares a motherboard with the T1700 workstation, but it's decent enough and I'd pick one over any 'consumer' motherboard for stability. It also supports ECC (but doesn't require it). I believe it'll hold 6 drives in the case (2x2.5" and 4x3.5") but only has 4 SATA ports and 4 power connectors so you need an add-in card and some adapters. There's a reasonable amount of room in the case too if you wanted to cram a few more disks in above the lower HDD bay.

Exactly - but what do you expect for £93? You pays your money .......etc

A couple of reviews say this uses 30W idle and 42W under load for the Xeon version so I imagine the Pentium model would be similar or less, that's a very good power consumption for essentially a full desktop computer if those numbers are true.

Isn't a 500GB 7200RPM Hard Drive worth at least £30?? So only £63 excluding that?

officially 4x3.5" drives (2 at top and 2 at bottom cage) and you can have one slim laptop type optical drive or 2x2.5" drives in that slot. that's 6 drives in total but the mobo only has 4 sata ports. i'm using windows 10 and found a jmiron controller on ebay that works but the official model is pexsat32 by startech which you can get for £21 from mymemory on ebay. i've ordered one but not tried it but others have reported it working and they mention win10x64 drivers

in addition to the official slots, under the top cage is a bracket where a 3.5" drive slots in perfectly but lining up the holes to screw in is a problem, but it's reasonably secure. you can also stick a drive on top of the bottom cage, i stuck a part cd case and put a drive on top and that works. there's also space on the bottom for at least one more 3.5" drive, maybe 2, it depends on if you have a big card or card on the bottom but one is possible. so i've got 8 drives in total, 6x3.5" and 2x2.5", with 2 adapters, i could get another pcie adapter and add another at the bottom and add a esata port for example. there are 3 pci-e and one pci slot

with the g3220 i couldn't get osx to run in a VM, copying the files from a working VM that worked on a q8330 and a c2d 2.0 old laptop. so doubt you can boot into it. i've not fully looked into it as i only got the machine a few days ago. i'm not sure if you can run osx on a VM on the xeon version or if you upgrade to an i5, which was my plan

depends on whether you want it - personally it's worthless to me (I'd want an SSD for OS and/or VMs, and 500GB is too small to waste a SATA port and physical space for in a storage server), and I don't think you'll get anywhere near £30 on eBay if you try and sell it.

Really the £70 after cashback version with no disks from a few weeks back was a "better" deal, but this is still very good for the money and is a very cheap way to get a more than capable system for little more than beer money.

I personally wouldn't recommend a perc since they have some quirks. I remember the order drives came up in would change each boot unless all the drives were in 1 drive RAID 0 arrays. Once figured out it was fine but still, makes hotswapping drives a pain.

Sounds like you were using a RAID card when you should have been using an HBA - hardware RAID cards are generally a bad idea unless you're actually using their RAID capabilities as they all display 'odd' behaviour like this from time to time.

Considering buying this for Plex, what OS do you have installed on this?

Server 2010, or was it 2012... Heh, works fine on windows server os anyeay, or linux. Depends what takes your fancy.

Thanks, I think I have Server 2012 lying around so will just go for it.

Heat added.. jst ordered

Use Linux and it will run MUCH better and more reliably

What version of Linux are you using?

Kubuntu

​What's required to get this up and running with esxi/vsan?

I've never installed/used Linux, any suggestions where to start - Primarily will be using it with Plex.

Download Rufus and a Linux image, this will allow you to create a bootable USB drive to install your chosen distro.

Please note any version of Linux can be a server as you can install any module you like post install

Thanks .. It'll be arriving tomorrow so hopefully play around with it then :smiley:

Thinking of getting one of these. Would Win10 be any good on this machine, and has anyone got te cash back yet. The link on ebuyer doesnt link to Dell website. Is it from another company the cashback?

https://plus.delltradetosave.com/gb/en/pages/promotions/qualifying

If you look on eBay you'll find it's hard even to give them away - I bought one by accident (thought it was 2.5") for 99p a couple of weeks ago...

I got this deal last time it came around and the cashback was very quick and easy when I figured out how to get a VAT invoice from ebuyer. If there is no VAT number on the invoice then it will be rejected.

how do you get a VAT invoice from ebuyer? it's now time that i can claim for mine

gone up to £179.99

Seconded! DiscoCentral, any pointers would be welcome. :smiley:

i logged into ebuyer, found my orders, look carefully and you see invoice as a hyperlink, i think click that and somewhere is a thing that lets you turn it into a vat invoice with a warning you can only keep 4 vat invoices on the account (presumably if its a business account thats not the case), do that and it shows a vat invoice on screen that you need to screengrab or save as a pdf with something like cutepdf, which is how i did it

the oldest purchase at this minute is 30th april that you can claim for on the site, it doesn't show may yet

Such a shame they use yodel for delivering really ruins the experience / rep ebuyer has

Thanks uni. :smiley:

Thanks uni, all went well and my claim was validated as of yesterday. :smiley: