Which is more important in Dell server specifications?
2025-05-09
When evaluating Dell PowerEdge server specifications, the importance of each feature depends on your workload requirements and operational priorities. Based on the provided search results, here are the most critical specifications to consider, ranked by their impact on performance, scalability, and adaptability:
- Form Factor: tower means that it’s not a rackmount server. So you can’t put it in a server rack, it’ll have to be on a desk or on the floor in a closet or something. Normal for a small shop but atypical for any place that has IT.
- Processor - I would not consider anything with a Pentium class CPU in it to be a “server”. This is literally as low-end as you can get. You’d want a Core series at a minimum, but it should be a Xeon if you intend to do any real work with it.
- OS - No OS means it doesn’t have Linux or Windows. So you’ll get the server and turn it on then..nothing. Dell’s assuming that you’re going to provide your own operating system and they’ve licensed it accordingly (no Windows license, no pre-installed anything)
- Memory - 4G is practically useless even on a desktop, but even with a light-duty file server it’s not going to be enough to run even just Windows. You could get by on Linux with no intended heavy lifting. 8G minimum, but shoot for 16.
- Hard Drive - A 1TB drive 7.2RPM drive has a few problems:
- This is basically the slowest drive you can still purchase
- It’s probably big enough for a while, though.
- The -real- problem is that there’s only one of them. You should have 2 of them in a mirror, minimum. It would be better to have 4+ of them in a redundant array (see next)
- RAID is a technique to combine multiple cheap hard drives into a larger drive that can optionally be configured for redundancy in the drives. That means if you have 4x1TB drives in “RAID5”, if you lose one drive you haven’t lost any data yet. You can rebuild it; 2 drives concurrently is a total data loss. In normal RAID5, you can have X disks and can lose exactly 1 of them and still survive with data intact. That’s kind of a minimum.
Also in this case, you’re using software RAID, which is generally ill-advised for something you care about. You want a physical hardware RAID controller, though Dell’s isn’t the best. They call it a PERC; they do okay.
Overall what you’ve got here is a low-end desktop PC being sold as a server in a fancy case.