Dell PowerEdge SC1430

There's plenty of room for expansion, as the motherboard has one spare PCI Express 4x slot along with one 33MHz PCI and two 100MHz PCI-X slots. The motherboard has four embedded SATA ports, but these are unemployed, as the price includes a PERC 5i PCI-e RAID card complete with 256MB of cache memory. The controller supports RAID0, 1 and 5 arrays, plus hot-spare. Although largely academic on the SC1430, it does have a pair of four-port connectors on its edge. Dell only provides management tools for the SAS version of this card, but they both use LSI Logic chipsets, so the bundled Storage Manager Windows utility will work with either version. We found it provides a smart interface, with views of logical and physical drives, arrays and status information. A wizard helps with array configuration, although alert notifications are limited to an audible alarm.

The PowerEdge SC1430 is a great package. It offers a good hardware specification for the price, making it a fine choice for small businesses looking for a compact and quiet server with some real processing muscle.

Author: Dave Mitchell