Tuesday, August 22, 2006

PC Hardware: Dell Precision 220

I recently changed servers from a custom-built PC I had to my old Dell Precision 220. Mostly I made the choice because the processor in the custom PC is a tad bit faster than the 220's. It's running an Athlon 1GHz (of the Thunderbird variety) where as the 220 is running a Pentium III. True, the 220 can accommodate two P3s ... but not many of the apps I use take advantage of that fact. The Dell is also a little bit better engineered so it works a little better as a server.

I purchased a number of upgrades to turn the 220 into a worthy server. In no particular order:
I bought the memory prior to really getting into eBay. Once I did I wished I had gone ahead and bought the memory there as well. I could have gotten 1GB for the same price I got 512MB for a new module. I looked for a while but nobody was selling single RDRAM modules, only pairs which were going at prices higher than I wanted to spend. So I'm stuck at 768MB ... which seems to be fine.

Most of the the other components I bought new because I didn't want used parts. This machine will be pretty well abused with all the services running on it: Beyond TV, music, web, mail, etc.

A note on the SATA controller/hard-drives I bought. I was specifically looking for parts capable of a specific SATA feature, Native Command Queue. From what little I've read this feature doesn't provide much use on a desktop (at least not yet). But since this machine is being used more as a server I think it'll be important.

Most of the upgrades were painless, but I did run into some minor problems with the power supply:

First, Dell uses a custom pin configuration on the motherboard's power connector. During installation I noted that the PCPower part had a different pin-out from the Dell part. After some conferring with the PCPower techs, however, I was assured that the Silencer would work without issue ... and it did.

Second, while installing the power supply I realized that Dell customized their part further (beyond the pin out customization) by moding the shell. Two notches are cut in the top of the power supply that help hold it in place, along with a lone screw. I didn't want to risk any problems with the Silencer falling out of place so I got around the issue by using two zip ties.

Third, some time after installing the Silencer I noticed that my APC was switching to battery mode enough to drain the battery. That was a big problem. At first I thought the unit was having problems due to continuous high voltage (hovering around 128 quite often). But after looking through the APC knowledge base I found a few articles that talked about Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) and how it can cause the UPS to switch to battery mode. Switching the sensitivity of the UPS to "medium" seems to have addressed that problem.

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