The newest addition to my home lab is a Dell PowerEdge T320. A great server from Dell’s 12-th generation. It has a 6 core / 12 threads Xeon E5 2320 CPU, 48 GB of RAM and 4 x 3 TB Seagate Constellation ES.2 SAS hard drives. I configured them in a RAID 10 using the H310 controller.


The good news is that 12-th generation from Dell or the Gen 8 from HP became so affordable that you can buy them used without spending too much money. It’s probably time to forget about the Dell R610 / R710 or the DL360 / DL380 Gen 7 from HP, that use the older Xeon 56xx series processors.

I could have went with a Dell R720 for about the same money and I’m glad I didn’t. Don’t get me wrong: the Dell R620/R720 are great servers, regardless if you get them with the 2.5″ or the 3.5″ hard drives.

The T320 is a tower, not much bigger than a standard desktop. The noise was acceptable for a server, but not completely quiet. What I did was a very simple trick. It’s using a single standard 12 cm fan on the back. I just replaced that one with a similar size case fan I had and the sound is minimal. I can hear the hard drives moving their heads more than I can hear the fan. I assume the original fan was silent years ago, but the age added some noise. Also, the power supply is dead silent. Right now, the server is purring like a kitten.

Yes, I still use the old fashioned HDD’s instead of SSD’s. But there is that feeling of having a server with a RAID matrix made from enterprise class drives, instead of one consumer type SSD. Even if the SSD is faster.

I’ve seen comment on various websites stating that the H310 is not the best controller form the server. So what ? It does a decent work, and it’s the standard controller that Dell sells with this server or with its bigger brother, the two socket T420. It doesn’t have cache or battery and the other RAID controller, the H710 is arguably a better, faster option. But hey: it’s a home lab and budget is an important criteria when buying servers for personal use.

There is also this myth that rack servers are louder than tower ones, or 1U servers produce more noise than a 2U, because of a not-so-tested logic that small fans are noisy and large fans are quiet. Well, that is not entirely accurate. I had both Dell R610 and R710 and the noise was better on the R610 which is a 1U. When I bought this tower server, before replacing the case fan, it was just as not-so-quiet as the Dell R710: acceptable, but could do better. And it did. On the other hand, replacing the fans in a Dell R710/R720 is not that easy, because they have proprietary connectors, So keep that in mind when choosing between a rack and a tower server.

In the end, they are all great machines for a home lab. By all means, get one. The more recent, the better.