dell p1900 or p840 server

ednwireland

my inclination is the p1900, i've specced these up with 4gb ram quad core processors, 2 500gb discs and the p1900 is 15 euro more. the p1900 has thwe e5310 processor 2x4mb cache 1.6ghz, whilst the 840 has the x3220 2x4mb cache 2.4ghz
its running small business server for about 10 users and file and print
heard that the p1900 is noisy its in an office

ressem

The P1900 would not really be an option to be placed in a corner of an office, in an open space you can hear it from 50 yards.

As for your spec, I guess that you are looking at 2 slow sata disks in a raid 1 configuration. I would strongly suggest that you look at SAS disks, or a second pair of disks for Exchange's files. Exchange and it's stores are pretty sensitive to hard disk performance, even with a small number of users.

A similar setup I saw recently in this configuration (SATA Raid 1, the cheap SAS/sata controller) resulted in exchange and outlook repeatedly becoming disconnected, with RPC calls not responding in anything like the expected times, and antivirus checks taking two or three as long as they should.

If this comes too late, Microsoft have a tool ExTRA (Exchange Troubleshooting Assistant ) which will benchmark your exchange setup, warn you of bottlenecks and suggest improvements.
I might have a copy of the report for that machine to give you an idea of the issues you might encounter.

ednwireland

thanks for that will see if the budget will allow (its a replacement of an 8 year old server)