I have a Dell T320 tower server and I love it. It does storage related roles: VEEAM backup, file server, PLEX server and it’s ready for more. The CPU is a modest Xeon E5 2403 quad core, but it’s enough for what it does, since it’s not doing any virtual machines. Also, it keeps the power consumption low.

Recently, I found two rack servers R320 on ebay and, reluctantly, I bid for them. The price was about 70 Canadian dollars, which is a steal. I hoped I would win at least one of them if the other bidders don’t attack them in great numbers.

Guess what: I was the only bidder for both. Well, it happens. So now, the two of them are purring like kittens in my lab. And when I say purring, i mean it. They are at least as quiet as the R210 II. The setting that did it was in iDRAC – OS controlled power efficiency. The 4 pairs of fans (5, for the one with redundant PS) spin at about 1800 rpm, which is almost at the lower limit of what a human ear is capable to hear from 3-4 feet away.

Hardware side: the configuration for both servers is: Intel Xeon E5 1410 4c/8t, 16 and 24 GB of RAM. First one has a H710 RAID controller with 4×2.5″ 600GB 10k SAS drives in RAID 10 and it’s running Windows 2016 with Hyper-V. The second one has a H310 RAID controller with 2×2.5″ 600 GB 10k SAS drives in 3.5 caddies, in RAID 1, and it’s running ESXi 6.5.

I can barely hear them. They are as quiet as a desktop PC. If it wasn’t for the spinning drives, the sound would have been zero. In a way, it would have been scary not to hear anything. They are servers, after all. You need at least a hum just to know they are there.

I’ve already ordered the V2 version of their CPU’s, the E5 24xx series, just for the lower power consumption and for the fact that they are newer.

So, if you are reading this, and you are looking for a good, quiet and powerful enough server for your home lab, look no further. This is the best bang for the buck. You could go higher, for a T or R420, if you want 2 CPU’s, or even R520, if you want 8 drives and a rack form factor in the same box. I can’t, however, speak about how quiet the R520 is or isn’t . If I need a server for storage, I would use a tower. I already do.

The bigger brothers, Dell R620 or R720 are also great machines, but at the expense of being larger, a bit louder and power hungrier. My R320 with H710 and 4 hard drives, stays at 70 watt. Can you beat that ?