Whenever we can, usually in the weekend, we showcase a tech hardware related review submitted by a member in our forums. Remember that we consider all reviews that are submitted here. So if you"ve recently bought a new gadget and you"re impressed, or even disappointed by it, let the community know by submitting a review about it; your review might make the front page next week! The more complex the review is, the more likely it will be selected.
This week we"ve selected n_K for a very in depth review of the HP DL160 C6 server; due to the poor quality of the included images I went and found one online for this article.
Image credit: Flickr (under creative commons license).
A bit of a background;
I"ve been using/playing around with servers for about 13 years, started off with a custom dedicated red hat box with an AMD chip and it really only just hosted a web server on a single IP. Gone on from them basically sticking to Dells (although I"ve toyed with some IBMs too). Anyway, for the past 4 years I"ve been using a 2U Dell Poweredge 2950 with PERC 6 and DRAC 5, dual low-voltage quad-core processors at 2Ghz per core and 8GB RAM with 3 2.5" 73GB SAS drives in RAID-5.
So, because it was getting a little too noisy for me at times due to the heat and has a 750W power supply but I"m using less than 200W in the server itself so it"s wasting power I thought it was time to upgrade and get something smaller and quieter, so I looked around for Dells like usual, and saw a few that I was interested in, but what I wanted was DDR3 because the DDR2 that the 2950 uses is MUCH more expensive than DDR3 and slower. Then I discovered the HP DL160 G6 server, and it seemed great upon first glance...
Photos disclaimer: By the way, I took the pictures for this review after the server was put into it"s full permanent position and use, therefore I can"t get pictures of the front or back of the server due to where it is but these pictures are readily available on google, it"s pictures of the internals you can"t find though and I also apologise for the pretty poor quality of the pictures, I took them with an iPod touch as I don"t have an actual dedicated camera to use. So here it is, my first review!