Without the drives, the system drew about 50W at idle with C3 enabled. Power consumption did increase a bit once I got all of the drives installed.
Most importantly, the heatsink of the PERC H200 was barely warm to the touch – success! It was totally masked by the noise of the system and PSU fan.
#DELL PERC H200 SPECS FULL#
The two Kingston SSDs were also correctly detected as SATA-SSDs by the card.Įven with the Noctua fan was spinning at full RPM, I was happy that it added no noticeable increase in the noise of the system. As you can see my four drives were detected in the Dell PERC H2-8i BIOS. I powered up the system and everything worked perfectly. It’s quite a string of adapters, but works perfectly. Also, because the T110 doesn’t have any molex connectors hanging off the power supply I had to buy a SATA to molex adapter as well.
This allowed me to connect a 4-pin PWM fan to a simple +12V two wire adapter. To get this to work, I simply modified a ‘molex to fan’ power adapter by removing the 3-pin female connector and replacing it with a 4-pin female connector. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find anything that would work with this, and I really didn’t want to hack up the fan cable on the system fan. If successful, the fan could spin up/down along with the primary system fan. I was originally hoping I could use some kind of a splitter on the 5-pin system fan header so that I could utilize the PWM capabilities of the Noctua fan. Getting power to the fan was a more challenging endeavour. I had originally thought there wouldn’t be enough clearance over the slots directly, but I was mistaken and this worked beautifully. I simply used a nut, bolt and a small metal bracket to hold the fan in position. There are a few small openings at the bottom of the case for some kind of an accessory. Installing my Noctua NF-B9 fan in this area was a piece of cake. Unfortunately, the plastic shroud over the CPU heatsink hampers cooling to the PCI slot area of the case. I also used one of the internal USB ports for an 8GB USB thumb drive for the FreeNAS installation.įinally, I had to figure out a way to get some active airflow over the heatsink of the volcanic PERC H200. I hope to dedicate the two Intel adapters for iSCSI. The PowerEdge T110 has an onboard Broadcom NIC, but I’ll likely use that one for management purposes.
#DELL PERC H200 SPECS PRO#
With the drives installed, I went ahead and installed an Intel Pro 1000/PT dual port NIC in the PCI-E x4 slot.
If it wasn’t for these two, the connector would have been blocked on my SSDs as the adapter centers the drive in the caddy. As you can see in the first picture above, there is a slightly smaller piece of plastic on the front of two of the caddies. In a very fortunate coincidence, the drive caddies I ordered were actually two different revisions of the same Dell part number. Eventually, I hope to add a hotswap enclosure to one of the 5.25″ drive bays for 2.5″ drives, but for now this will have to do. To get around this, I just loosened the screws securing the SSDs and the cable connector to get a couple of extra millimeters of clearance for the connector. They were a perfect fit for the drive caddies I bought off of ebay, but they interfered with the Dell SATA brakout cable connector. To get the two 2.5″ SATA drives installed, I used a couple of Kingston brand 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapters. Unfortunately, I didn’t need to buy the two SATA breakout cables that I discussed in part 1 of the series, but at least I’ve got extras if I ever want to add more drives to the system. This Dell breakout cable is very flexible and because of the built-in power connector, makes for a very clean and secure wiring job. Because of this, there is often too much pressure on the connectors and I’ve even had issues with them coming loose. In all of the custom builds I’ve done, it’s really tough to get clean SATA-power wiring because of the close proximity of the drives. It’s totally meant for this machine and keeps the wiring organized. I had a few challenges here, but I was very thankful that I kept the Dell branded SATA cable that came with the PERC H200 card. To begin, I installed my drives into the server’s normal 3.5″ mounting locations. Today, I’ll be installing the drives and completing the build. In part 4 of this series, I took a look at my new used Dell PowerEdge T110 and talked about the pros and cons about using this type of machine.
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