I just got my R240 today and plugged it in. It is extremely quiet. It makes noise starting up, but after that, you can not hear it. I would imagine that under full load you would hear it more... I am not sure about the power, but I would imagine that it is inline with the R210 II. My R210 II idle @ 23 watts..
Dell Poweredge R240 - Barebones w/ Xeon E-2124 - $180
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I got one at that price too. It arrived today. It looks better than the pictures. Now, I am torn on whether I should use this as my pfsense box. It is much more capable. I am currently using my R210 II as the pfsense router.
With 4x 16GB RAM, 1x SATA SSD mine is idling around 38W in Debian. Might be able to shave some power off if I get rid of the H330 and run off the onboard SATA. Not sure what cabling looks like for the SATA controller configuration, some of the random cables on eBay don't seem to make sense.
Edit: Looks like you would use Dell PN #02F8RD for the SATA config?
Edit: Looks like you would use Dell PN #02F8RD for the SATA config?
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from the service tag, server configuration shows
405-AANS : PERC H330 RAID Controller, Adapter, Full Height
400-ASHH : 1TB 7.2K RPM SATA 6Gbps 512n 3 .5in Hot-plug Hard Drive
putting in orders for caddies. Can I plug in either SATA or SAS drives? Planning on running long scans on a bunch of SAS drives before install TruNas.
405-AANS : PERC H330 RAID Controller, Adapter, Full Height
400-ASHH : 1TB 7.2K RPM SATA 6Gbps 512n 3 .5in Hot-plug Hard Drive
putting in orders for caddies. Can I plug in either SATA or SAS drives? Planning on running long scans on a bunch of SAS drives before install TruNas.
If you're planning on running truenas you should either swap the H330 for an HBA330, or at the very least flash the HBA330 firmware to the H330.
Can anyone share some clear 'top down' photos of the internals? (showing drive area, if there is a backplane or not, cables used etc). I ordered mine shipped direct to my colo rack and won't get to them for a little while, but I'd like to order whatever parts I need now.
Ahh!! They're hot swap. AWESOME! I wish I bought a few more. Caddies for the non-hot swap model are nearly impossible to find. Many thanks for the photos!
For my fleet of R240s, I have usually swapped out the PERC H330 for a 10G NIC, and then putting an Intel P4610 1.6TB NVMe SSD into the other PCI slot for L2ARC. You can plug the backplane directly into the motherboard with cable P# 0V4NCY
This turns an average box into a great workhorse, and unofficially supports 128GB of DDR4 ECC UDIMMs (4x 32GB).
So, there's no internal connectors for boot drives? This sucks if that is the case. Why would they designed this to have you sacrifice one or more storage bays? I see something mentioning a BOSS card, however, that would sacrifice a pci-e slot. There's only one pci-e slot left since one is already being used by the H330. That would sucks cause we would not even be able to add a 10G card...
This is good information because I was looking for this info. So, for confirmation, we can remove the H330 cause we can connect the back plane into the motherboard using this P# 0V4NCY? Another question, if you are using the NVMe SSD as L2ARC, what connections are you using for a boot drive?
Couple notes:
- The logs on mine showed it had been opened up once since 2019, decommed in May '23, afaict no updates ever applied.
- The sound card is essentially trash, it's not bad if you somehow needed onboard sound and had an X1 PCIE slot to spare but these days you'd just use USB
- Mine is absolutely not whisper quiet, even when spun down after boot. I have it in the same room as my 3D printer and the noise level is similar; alternately it's the same as my old Aruba switches. Fine for a computer room, unacceptable for a living room or most offices.
- It threw near-constant memory errors with the 32GB 3200mhz ECC DIMMS I'd picked up here until I updated the BIOS. So far after that it's been smooth sailing.
There's some internal connector (I assume SlimSAS) for 4 more SATA drives, and there's an internal SATA port and (of course nonstandard) power connector for the ODD these didn't come with. There's also an internal USB port I think you can plug a boot drive into. I could have sworn I'd seen an M.2 connector but I guess not.
E: Mine came with a mild amount of office dirt so it must not have come from an IT clean room. Also nothing apparently holds the H330 card in place, so mine had come almost completely out of the slot during shipping.
- The logs on mine showed it had been opened up once since 2019, decommed in May '23, afaict no updates ever applied.
- The sound card is essentially trash, it's not bad if you somehow needed onboard sound and had an X1 PCIE slot to spare but these days you'd just use USB
- Mine is absolutely not whisper quiet, even when spun down after boot. I have it in the same room as my 3D printer and the noise level is similar; alternately it's the same as my old Aruba switches. Fine for a computer room, unacceptable for a living room or most offices.
- It threw near-constant memory errors with the 32GB 3200mhz ECC DIMMS I'd picked up here until I updated the BIOS. So far after that it's been smooth sailing.
There's some internal connector (I assume SlimSAS) for 4 more SATA drives, and there's an internal SATA port and (of course nonstandard) power connector for the ODD these didn't come with. There's also an internal USB port I think you can plug a boot drive into. I could have sworn I'd seen an M.2 connector but I guess not.
E: Mine came with a mild amount of office dirt so it must not have come from an IT clean room. Also nothing apparently holds the H330 card in place, so mine had come almost completely out of the slot during shipping.
According to the manual, it's SATA standard, SAS optional, I guess that applies to whatever drives the chassis ships with. Looking in the bay it looks like it can take SAS physically, at least.
You can google all this or just find it here, these are bog-standard Dells, the only slightly odd config I've found so far is combining the hot-swap drive backplane with the fixed non-redundant PSU, but other than that these are basically what you'd get if you called Dell and said "give me the cheapest thing you sell that does rackmount, iDRAC and I can put a sound card in it"
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Thank you much for clearing this up for me. FYI... mine did not come with a sound card. It was just the H330...
If the chassis ships with an H330, it's almost certainly capable of running SAS drives.
Man I feel like I missed out by buying 2 @ 135 each and not offering lower. Sadly I have to wait until March until I get home and can actually unbox them. From what my Girlfriend told me they were individually boxed which is nice.
Does this have IDRAC Enterprise or Express on them?
Man I feel like I missed out by buying 2 @ 135 each and not offering lower. Sadly I have to wait until March until I get home and can actually unbox them. From what my Girlfriend told me they were individually boxed which is nice.
Does this have IDRAC Enterprise or Express on them?
They're designed for low cost, ROBO type operations where cost is the significant driver (hence no dual PSU, amongst things). If you want more you step up to the R340 for a second power supply and additional PCIe slot, or R440 for more BOSS-style boot options
A M.2 BOSS card is an option, IIRC these don't support NVMe BOSS cards, only the first-gen SATA ones. There is one USB port under the PCI cards, and a standard SATA port on the right hand side near the memory slots.
Yes. And for Proxmox, nothing, installing in raidz1 or raidz2 across all disks. For anything else, an Intel SATA SSD in the optical bay (using a generic caddy from Amazon) plugged into the optical drive connector and a Supermicro slim SATA cable to the other side of the box where the SATA port for the optical drive is.
IIRC You can set the power profile to efficiency somewhere in the BIOS which also helps keep the fans low. Most optical bay to SATA caddies from Amazon will convert the optical drive power connector to SATA power with no issues. There's no M.2 connector on these, unless it's on a PCIe BOSS M.2 card.
If I want to go the optical bay to SATA caddies, What will I need to make it happen on this?