Shocking! Server Interior Revealed!

Click on the images to see them full size.

Here’s a picture of my new Dell T110 server, with the cover off.

Here’s a little more detail. You can see the two drives mounted on the left hand side, with two conveniently vacant drive bays for a couple additional SATA drives. Upper middle are the four memory slots, each filled with a 2 megabyte chip for a total of eight megabytes. All the black stuff on the right is the shroud covering the heat sink. The unit is absolutely silent.

Finally, here it is in the final configuration. I’ve got an older Maxell external USB 250 megabyte drive as a backup device. The Small Business Server 2011 backup is much improved over Windows backup software that came with earlier Windows server software…almost as good as the Mac Time Machine.

This is the first purpose-bought server that I’ve bought in more than ten years for my business. I had a couple in the nineties. Then for two or three iterations, I’d buy Dell Precision workstations to use as my personal workstation, and then I’d bump them down to be a server. All of these machines have been very reliable. I even used one of the Optiplex GX270 desktops as a production server for more than six months.