Finally being fed up with all the hassles of running a server using standard PC mainboards, I stumbled over the latest addition to my hardware zoo: a Compaq Proliant DL380 (first generation). It sports two Pentium III 933 MHz CPUs, 2048 MBytes of RAM and came equipped with an integrated SCSI-RAID-Controller with two 18,2 GByte hard drives attached. I added an Adaptec ATA 2400A IDE RAID controller and four 250 GByte Samsung drives (running in RAID-5 mode) as well as a Promise Ultra 133 TX2 IDE adapter with two 200 GByte Maxtor drives (running in RAID-1 mode). First, the three of them refused to work together but this was resolved by upgrading the firmware of the machine itself as well as the one of integrated RAID array using HP’s Firmware Maintenance CD. Network connectivity is provided by a Netgear GA311 Gigabit Ethernet adapter, the DL380′s onboard Intel EEpro 100 Fast Ethernet port being disabled for the moment.
The minor problems with my choice of operating system – SUSE Linux 10.0 – aside, I really like the machine. It’s got more than enough processing power for my needs, three 64bit/66MHz PCI slots and a very good internal thermal design keeping the CPUs as well as the hard drives cool. The only drawback is the noise generated by the DL380′s fans. But that’s not a real problem anymore for by now it’s tucked away in my enclosure. Considering that DL380′s in mint condition are sold for roughly 250 Euros here, I might even add some more of them in the future.
