**Dell PowerEdge T20 Mini Tower Server - Owner Thread**

Buffalo2102

Buffalo2102

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I just replaced mine with a AMD 5600G and a micro ATX B550 MB. More cores, more powerful, less power, DDR4 RAM etc. but it's a desktop system really, not a server. Good enough for my uses, anyway.

I kind of wish I'd gone Intel now though. I use it for virtualisation and the IOMMU groups on the AMD system are awful if you want to pass anything through to a VM. There are ways around it but it's a pain.
 

Avalon

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itsthejb said:
Hi everyone,

My much loved (and old) T20 now appears to have gained a noisy and rattling power supply. So something is wrong and will need to be resolved. Has anyone else had this issue and resolved it in the short-term?

I also have thoughts to finally replace the unit with a mini/micro PC and DAS box for drives, so if anyone else has upgrade the machine in recent times to something similarly (or more) powerful, then I'm open to opinions to finally upgrade.

Cheers!
Click to expand...
Likely just the fan, in terms of something newer, you're going to have to give us some clue as to what you actually want to do with it to get anything more than a bunch of people telling you what does/doesn't work for what they do with it, which isn't much use if that's not your usage case.
 

itsthejb

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Cheers, @Avalon. Yes, no doubt it's the power supply fan, I could feel and hear the vibration coming from there. I already had it opened and cleaned it up, but noted that power supply / fan don't appear very accessible. Has anyone on here done it and can advise? Power supplies certainly make me a little nervous! I suppose it's not actually broken.

As for the replacements, I was thinking about something like:
  • Mini PC e.g. *** competitor link removed ***
  • External HD enclosure *** competitor link removed ***
  • And connecting those via USB-C w/ an expansion card such as *** competitor link removed ***
I realised how much power my set up was using recently and keen to reduce that. However I noticed than many of the NUC-type machines (e.g. *** competitor link removed ***) come with Thunderbolt and no USB-C, and Thunderbolt enclosures are rarer and more expensive.

Any input from anyone much appreciated! Preferably I just fix the T20 issue in the short-term and not rush into buying a replacement yet
 
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NeoVo

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itsthejb said:
Hi everyone,

My much loved (and old) T20 now appears to have gained a noisy and rattling power supply. So something is wrong and will need to be resolved. Has anyone else had this issue and resolved it in the short-term?

I also have thoughts to finally replace the unit with a mini/micro PC and DAS box for drives, so if anyone else has upgrade the machine in recent times to something similarly (or more) powerful, then I'm open to opinions to finally upgrade.

Cheers!
Click to expand...
I was after some additional memory for my T20 and found the compatibility to be very fussy.
In the end i managed to pick up a fully functional second hand Dell-T20 off that well known auction site, quite a few on there going with Xeon's, 16GB memory for sub £50.

Worked out very well actually, although i've salvaged the memory for mine; I affectively have a complete set of spares; albeit admittedly unknown uptime.
Maybe thats an option for you?
 

itsthejb

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Yes, in fact I almost did this a while ago and regret that I didn't now. However, I appear to have been able to find a power supply separately for just a tenner. Seems like a reasonable fix for the time being and I can consider gradually migrating over to the potential two-box solution at my leisure
 

Jamauk

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itsthejb said:
Hi everyone,

My much loved (and old) T20 now appears to have gained a noisy and rattling power supply. So something is wrong and will need to be resolved. Has anyone else had this issue and resolved it in the short-term?

I also have thoughts to finally replace the unit with a mini/micro PC and DAS box for drives, so if anyone else has upgrade the machine in recent times to something similarly (or more) powerful, then I'm open to opinions to finally upgrade.

Cheers!
Click to expand...
Mine did the same, I bought an identical T20 from eBay and swapped the power supply, the old power supply is in the replacement T20. Ironically doing it that way was cheaper than buying a PSU on its own, and I have a spare T20 now so if the old one fails I can just swap everything out.

There's not really anything out there that will provide additional functionality to it.
 
Last edited:

Avalon

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itsthejb said:
Cheers, @Avalon. Yes, no doubt it's the power supply fan, I could feel and hear the vibration coming from there. I already had it opened and cleaned it up, but noted that power supply / fan don't appear very accessible. Has anyone on here done it and can advise? Power supplies certainly make me a little nervous! I suppose it's not actually broken.

As for the replacements, I was thinking about something like:
  • Mini PC e.g. *** competitor link removed ***
  • External HD enclosure *** competitor link removed ***
  • And connecting those via USB-C w/ an expansion card such as *** competitor link removed ***
I realised how much power my set up was using recently and keen to reduce that. However I noticed than many of the NUC-type machines (e.g. * ** competitor link removed ***) come with Thunderbolt and no USB-C, and Thunderbolt enclosures are rarer and more expensive.

Any input from anyone much appreciated! Preferably I just fix the T20 issue in the short-term and not rush into buying a replacement yet
Click to expand...
USB enclosures are not something I would personally choose to put my faith in, it can go very wrong very quickly, some people do it and don't have issues, others have nightmares, also you can buy NAS cases for less than that DAS costs.

Power is a subjective term, at our peak power prices it was roughly £3/yr per watt if you were running 24/7/365, so 50w is £150/yr, obviously prices are now lower, but you need to find the trade off between sticking as you are and not spending money or spending and having a reasonably short break even period. A lot also depends on how much storage that you need, how fast it has to be, and what type of storage. Unraid for example is great for media storage as idle drives are 1.x watt spun down, less so for high IOPS where ZFS is a natural choice, but every read or write potentially requires every drive in the pool to spin up. Also things like flash arrays are great, but only if you have the connectivity to make use of it.
 
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Buckster

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Jamauk said:
Mine did the same, I bought an identical T20 from eBay and swapped the power supply, the old power supply is in the replacement T20. Ironically doing it that way was cheaper than buying a PSU on its own, and I have a spare T20 now so if the old one fails I can just swap everything out.

There's not really anything out there that will provide additional functionality to it.
Click to expand...

I put a 3060Ti in mine so changed the power supply to a Corsair RM550x, had some space issues though so had to remove the door latch

In my daughters T20 - it has a GTX1050Ti - I put a Corsair CX550F in that and that fitted no issues

both needed an adapter for motherboard connector

I'm thinking of swapping out the Xeon 1225v3 in mine though for a 4790 or 4790K as the Xeon is definitely the bottleneck in games with the 3060Ti
 

Jamauk

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Buckster said:
I put a 3060Ti in mine so changed the power supply to a Corsair RM550x, had some space issues though so had to remove the door latch

In my daughters T20 - it has a GTX1050Ti - I put a Corsair CX550F in that and that fitted no issues

both needed an adapter for motherboard connector

I'm thinking of swapping out the Xeon 1225v3 in mine though for a 4790 or 4790K as the Xeon is definitely the bottleneck in games with the 3060Ti
Click to expand...
That's interesting, I didn't think the Xeon could be changed.
 

Avalon

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Buckster

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I'm tempted as a used (can't buy new) 4790k with warranty is about £65 which is not bad for the boost of performance vs a 1225v3

I think its a combination of the low boost clock, and even more so the lack of hyperthreading which is bottlenecking the 3060Ti
 

Avalon

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Buckster said:
I'm tempted as a used (can't buy new) 4790k with warranty is about £65 which is not bad for the boost of performance vs a 1225v3

I think its a combination of the low boost clock, and even more so the lack of hyperthreading which is bottlenecking the 3060Ti
Click to expand...
Given you can buy a full 8th gen i5 system for around £50 upwards, that seems like a questionable choice.
 

Avalon

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Buckster said:
really an full 8gth gen i5 system for £50 odd ?

including memory etc ? seems very cheap
Click to expand...
Why would ‘full system’ not be a full system? The HP 290 G2’s go for that sort of money regularly - I was considering one for a router box but it would take 4 years to break even, and that was when power was stupid, in that time several on my watch list went for £50-60. Unfortunately you need something to take a GPU and power it and that particular box won’t quite work, but buying a £65 4790K seems like you’re paying a lot of legacy tax for a 4c CPU that’s pretty average by modern standards, 8th gen i3’s had 4 physical cores for example.
 
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