June 2, 2002
In order to access the innards
of the server, you unscrew a single thumbscrew and slide off the side panel.
Then you can pop of the front bezel to access the drive bay cage.
All in all, the case is very nicely designed and well thought out.
However, it is not as sturdy as other cases I have worked with. Not
to say that it feels flimsy, but since many parts of the case are modular,
the structural integrity of the case is not that high. In order to
improve the rigidity of the frame, Dell added a cross member to the case
which you can see in the pictures.
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Click image to enlarge
Kinda ugly without the side
panel and front bezel huh?
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Click image to enlarge
Located above the floppy
drive are two 3.5 inch bays where you can add additional hard drives.
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Click image to enlarge
The primary hard drive is
mounted underneath the floppy drive. Interestingly, the drive is
designed to be mounted upside down. I guess it doesn't really matter
now does it?
Click image to enlarge
Here is the 250 watt power
supply. It may not sound like a lot of power, but considering the
CPU is fairly low power and we don't have to power a massive video card,
250 watts is just fine. One thing you should note: The connector
from the power supply to the motherboard looks like a regular ATX connector,
however, the pin outs are different. This is where Dell gets proprietary
on us. Don't connect a regular power supply to the Dell motherboard
or use the Dell power supply on a regular ATX motherboard. You'll
likely fry either the power supply or even worse, your motherboard.
Just thought you should know.
Click image to enlarge
Looking at the motherboard,
we can see the ServerWorks ServerSet LE 3.0 chipset. Wow, a real
server chipset.
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Click image to enlarge
In this next picture, we
can see the 2 green PCI slots which are 64 bit 66 Mhz. These are
useful for high bandwidth interface cards such as SCSI or Gigabit Ethernet.
To the left of the green slots is the integrated ATI-Rage XL controller
with 4MB of RAM.
Click image to enlarge
We'll cover the rest of the
internal components of the server later on. Now, let's go over the
process of actually building this server.
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