Dell Vostro 220 mini tower

Hey all,

So I have a Dell Vostro 220 that I currently use as my office PC. I am looking to build a rig for HD home movie editing, and was wondering if I could use the Dell for Unraid? I used Speccy to find some info on the motherboard. Here is what it says:

Motherboard

Manufacturer Dell Inc.

Model 0P301D

Chipset Vendor Intel

Chipset Model P45/P43/G45/G43

Chipset Revision A3

Southbridge Vendor Intel

Southbridge Model 82801JR (ICH10R)

Southbridge Revision 00

BIOS

Brand Dell Inc.

Version 1.1.4

Date 04/17/2009

Would it be safe to assume that this is the Intel DG45ID? Also here is the info on my CPU:

Intel Core 2 Duo E8400

Cores 2

Threads 2

Name Intel Core 2 Duo E8400

Code Name Wolfdale

Package Socket 775 LGA

Technology 45nm

Specification Intel® Core2 Duo CPU E8400 @ 3.00GHz

Family 6

Extended Family 6

Model 7

Extended Model 17

Stepping A

Revision E0

Instructions MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4.1, EM64T

Bus Speed 332.5 MHz

Rated Bus Speed 1330.1 MHz

Stock Core Speed 3000 MHz

Stock Bus Speed 333 MHz

Average Temperature 42 °C

As far as memory, I have (2) 2GB sticks of G.Skill DDR2 PC2-6400 currently installed.

There are 4 sata ports on board, as far as I can tell. I have 2 hard drives installed right now. The OS Drive is a WD2500AAJS. My data drive is a WD10EADS. I also just ordered 2 of the Seagate 2TB drives that are on sale at Newegg. Can I take out my 2 optical drives, and somehow fit the Seagates in, assuming this Dell will work?

Thanks in advance for helping a newb. I have zero experience whatsoever with servers, etc. 

Hmm, Dell does a lot of proprietary stuff on their motherboards. Even though the chipset should be fine (P45/G45 + ICH10R LAN), you might run into strange stuff in their implementation or their BIOS. I remember running into issues with their onboard video in particular, when someone wanted to add a video card.

Also, Dell's power supplies generally suck. They run fine as long as you don't add anything too power hungry, but beyond that, they're pretty worthless.

You can certainly disconnect your drives and plug in your unRAID drives to give it a whirl. Best case, you should be able to run four drives without issues.

What you can do to start with, is download the free version of unRAID, and go in an unplug your current drives, and plug in the new 2TB Seagate. Boot up with only the flash drive and the Seagate, and see if it will go. If it boots and recognizes the Seagate, then you're in pretty good shape.

Worst case, you'll need a new motherboard, case, and power supply. You should be able to get all that for no more than $200. You can of course spend more, depending on what bells and whistles you want. But a solid LGA775 board and decent case and power supply aren't that expensive. That will leave you in good shape for future expansion as well.

Hmm, Dell does a lot of proprietary stuff on their motherboards. Even though the chipset should be fine (P45/G45 + ICH10R LAN), you might run into strange stuff in their implementation or their BIOS. I remember running into issues with their onboard video in particular, when someone wanted to add a video card.

 

Also, Dell's power supplies generally suck. They run fine as long as you don't add anything too power hungry, but beyond that, they're pretty worthless.

 

You can certainly disconnect your drives and plug in your unRAID drives to give it a whirl. Best case, you should be able to run four drives without issues.

 

What you can do to start with, is download the free version of unRAID, and go in an unplug your current drives, and plug in the new 2TB Seagate. Boot up with only the flash drive and the Seagate, and see if it will go. If it boots and recognizes the Seagate, then you're in pretty good shape.

 

Worst case, you'll need a new motherboard, case, and power supply. You should be able to get all that for no more than $200. You can of course spend more, depending on what bells and whistles you want. But a solid LGA775 board and decent case and power supply aren't that expensive. That will leave you in good shape for future expansion as well.

 

 

kenoka,

Thanks so much for the quick response. I forgot to mention that I do have a ATI Radeon HD 4600 Series graphics card in the PCI-Express slot. I planned on removing that, though. I didn't have any problems with it running dual monitors for the past year or so.

So, as far as the PSU goes, this is what is in the Dell now:

http://www.txcesssurplus.com/servlet/the-6052/Dell-Vostro-220-Power/Detail

I've read on other forums that Dell PSUs are generally underrated. Do you think this would be ok for a 4 drive starter unraid box? This will be used to store and serve up all my media to a Acer Revo 3610, which is my XBMC frontend in my home theater/family room. I will also be dumping downloaded material from usenet, and recorded tv from a tuner, something like the HDHomerun. I am trying to do this as cheap as possible, because I am already going to spend more than I want building my first rig for video editing.

I like your idea to test the Dell with one of the new Seagate drives. Only problem is, I would almost certainly have to build my new video editing/office PC before I start tearing into the Dell, because my wife works from home, and uses the office PC exclusively. If you or someone else is fairly (like maybe 75%) confident that this Dell will work with Unraid, I will order the parts for my new build pretty quick, to take advantage of the great sales that are out there right now. 

Thanks again for your help. 

Looks like that's a 300W power supply with a single +12V rail with 18 amps. If you figure 2-3 amps per drive, you should be able to manage four drives on that PSU, assuming you pull that video card.

That's the easiest part to replace though, since it looks like it's a pretty standard ATX. The Corsair 430CX has been running on sale a lot lately, for as little as $20, and it has nearly double the power on the +12V rail at 28 amps. It's enough to run at least 10-12 drives, assuming you use "green" drives.

You should be able to test this system with unRAID with minimal fuss. Like I said, get the flash drive set up, and then all you have to do is unplug the SATA data and power cables from your existing drives, and just plug the Seagate in there. You don't have to install it or anything, just put it somewhere in the case that's flat and not prone to getting whanged by a fan. Heck, I've tested drives with them dangling from the cables at times. That was back in the IDE days, when the connections were a bit more secure though.

You should know within a few minutes whether or not it's going to work immediately. If you run into trouble, post your issues here.

Looks like that's a 300W power supply with a single +12V rail with 18 amps. If you figure 2-3 amps per drive, you should be able to manage four drives on that PSU, assuming you pull that video card.

 

That's the easiest part to replace though, since it looks like it's a pretty standard ATX. The Corsair 430CX has been running on sale a lot lately, for as little as $20, and it has nearly double the power on the +12V rail at 28 amps. It's enough to run at least 10-12 drives, assuming you use "green" drives.

 

You should be able to test this system with unRAID with minimal fuss. Like I said, get the flash drive set up, and then all you have to do is unplug the SATA data and power cables from your existing drives, and just plug the Seagate in there. You don't have to install it or anything, just put it somewhere in the case that's flat and not prone to getting whanged by a fan. Heck, I've tested drives with them dangling from the cables at times. That was back in the IDE days, when the connections were a bit more secure though.

 

You should know within a few minutes whether or not it's going to work immediately. If you run into trouble, post your issues here.

OK. I finally bought all the parts for my new video editing workstation, built my first ever PC, and installed all the apps I need for now. I took the OS & Media hard drives out of my old Dell, and installed the 2 new Seagate 2TB drives I bought during Black Friday into the Dell (which is my new Unraid server). I downloaded Unraid 4.6, and the syslinux utility, and put the files on a old 1GB Lexar Jumpdrive Sport USB drive I had laying around. Went into the Bios in the Dell, told it to boot from removable drive first, and also had to tell it not to halt on a "keyboard error", since I won't have a keyboard plugged into it. Pushed the power button, waited for about 90 seconds or so, and heard a few beeps.

Then I launched Firefox on my laptop, and typed "//tower" in the address bar and hit enter.    I am thrilled to say that the Dell Vostro works as a Unraid server...so far. I was able to assign one of the 2TB Seagates as a parity device, and the other Seagate as disk1 device. So now my question is, what is the quickest way to move all of my media (806 GB) from the old 1TB WD10EADS drive, to the new Unraid array? If it helps, right now I have the media drive in my new workstation, and I do have 1 esata port on the top of the case. Can I just run a sata cable from the workstation to the motherboard in the Dell unraid box? I was hoping for a solution that would be quicker than transferring all the files over my network.

Any help is greatly appreciated. 

Matt