Dell PowerEdge T20 review

Our review machine came fitted with a 1TB Seagate Barracuda hard disk and a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Blue disk. Neither is enterprise-class when it comes to durability, but one of the advantages of a RAID array is that you don’t have to worry too much about any one disk failing. It’s worth noting that Dell doesn’t guarantee any particular brand when you buy disks, though, just the quality and speed.

Although the case is deeper than your average desktop midi tower, the positioning of the MicroATX motherboard relative to the bottom drive cage means you won’t be able to take advantage of the extra depth. PCI-E cards have 265mm of space before they grind against the cage, which rules out full-length hardware telephony cards and using giant graphics cards to run high-speed calculations.

The E93839 motherboard has two PCI-E x16 slots, one of which is full speed and other of which runs at x4, as well as PCI-E x1 slot and a PCI slot. PSU is a basic 290W model, so bear that in mind before planning any power-hungry upgrades.

There are four DDR3 memory slots, one of which is in use, four SATA2 ports and two SATA3 ports. The mid-board USB3 header is connected to a couple of USB3 ports on the front panel. You’ll also find two more USB3 ports at the rear, along with four more USB2 ports. There are PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports for older peripherals. Importantly, there’s a single Gigabit Ethernet port, as well as a serial port, the latter being useful if you need your server to communicate with legacy hardware.

Graphics output is handled by a pair of full-sized DisplayPort connections and a legacy VGA port. Unless you’ve bought a high-end business monitor recently, you’ll want to use the VGA. There’s little point worrying about the display output, however, as once the T20’s set up you can access your server remotely. Dell’s standard warranty gives you one year of parts-only cover, but a range of extended warranty options are available, up to three years of next business day onsite support for £84.

TESTING

Although there are plenty of server operating systems available, we prefer Ubuntu Server. We initially installed Ubuntu 12.04, but encountered conflicts between the GRUB2 boot loader and the server’s UEFI BIOS. This required a number of inconvenient workarounds if you wish to set up a software RAID array and although the UEFI has a legacy mode, using it didn’t help. Fortunately, when we tested with the latest Ubuntu 14.04 our RAID configuration and installation went smoothly and the system booted first time.

Although the motherboard has a built-in Intel RAID controller, we prefer using software RAID in the absence of a dedicated RAID controller card. This eliminates the risk of not being able to find a replacement motherboard that can rebuild your array. You’re less likely to run into problems with server motherboards from a big manufacturer, but we prefer the security of using software RAID for servers in this price range nevertheless.

The primary business use of servers such as this one is to provide a more flexible alternative to a NAS, so read and write speeds are critical. In our standard SMB read/write test across a network, both read and write speeds in our large file test were 109MB/s, while the T20 wrote and read more challenging small files at speeds of 17.7MB/s and 25.9MB/s respectively. This compares well to heavy-duty business NAS devices such as the Seagate Business Storage 8-Bay Rackmount NAS (http://www.expertreviews.co.uk/network-storage/1306702/seagate-business-storage-8-bay-rackmount-nas-16tb) in terms of performance.