Dell PowerEdge T410 review

Designed for remote offices and small businesses with space at a premium, Dell’s new PowerEdge T410 is less than 62cm deep and small enough to fit under a desk.

Storage options haven’t been compromised, though, with the review system kitted out with an internal bay supporting up to six cold-swap 3.5in SAS and SATA hard disks. Smaller 2.5in SFF SAS and SATA drives are also offered as options, and the hot-swap version of the T410 has the drive bay moved to the front.

The server is nicely built and designed, with good physical security. The front grille can be locked to protect the hot-swap bays and the internal hard drive bay can only be accessed from behind the lockable side panel.

The base system comes with a simple LED status panel, but you can opt for a backlit LCD version. It also has a control keypad for setting the remote management network address and scrolling through views of power consumption and temperatures.

The side panel feels tough enough to withstand a direct hit, and with this removed the T410 reveals a tidy interior with the six drive bays towards the front of the chassis. For RAID we had Dell’s SAS 6/iR card, which provides a pair of four-port connectors as well as support for mirrors and stripes.

The four drives in the review system were all wired to one port, and the second port had combined SATA/power cables already in place. If you want RAID5 or 6 arrays then you need to go for the PERC 6/i card, which also supports extra cache memory and the optional battery backup pack.

The lower part of the motherboard is covered by an enormous black plastic shroud to aid airflow over the processors and memory. It isn’t pretty, but this arrangement has allowed Dell to use a single 12cm diameter cooling fan for the entire chassis. This keeps noise levels down to a whisper, making the T410 a perfect partner for small offices.

Behind the shroud we found a pair of E5502 Xeons fitted with large passive heatsinks, each accompanied by four dedicated memory slots. These dual-core processors represent the entry point of the Series 5500 Xeons, and don’t support Hyper-Threading or TurboBoost. The server came with 6GB of DDR3 RDIMM triple-channel memory, but the E5502 Xeons in this system support a maximum memory speed of only 800MHz.