New Dell 320 today

Not sure of the number but it was sitting on top of the box...

It is a 1U 8 slot  X 2.5 drive chassis still with slim optical drive.

I was waiting for some folder copies on a different  server to finish at 4PM Friday so I plugged in the power with the goal of installing an OS. It has dual redundant power supplies but on a y cable which is not great for changing out dead UPS's but whatever; this is not a mission critical server, it is data gathering server in a factory, destined to be a Postgres/LAMP virtualized pair (I hope). So I plug in an Ethernet cable to the iDRAC dedicated port, got to the front of the machine resolve that iDRAC is 192.168.0.120 and subnet mask is 255.255.255.0 straight from Dell! common knowledge, but I can't ping it. So I hook up physical KVM. Ah ha the gateway is in the 192 range which is DMZ. This is interesting. Just like "Top Gear" some may say that IDRAC should come configured OOB with DHCP. maybe true? Anyway, ctrl/e configure IDRAC to a routable network IP with a physical Keyboard mouse and VGA monitor and the IDRAC GUI and virtual console are on the network. installation is done via DVD and more of the same Dell 12G/13G goodness. It really is the Perc H7xx controllers and the validation of these controllers that make these servers shine, they perform at 1Gig cache levels, and the consistency of the RAID interface from 11G has made things very nice. Through acquiring new hardware (13G) and re-purposing older (12G/11G) and maintaining older (11G). The latest 13G Perc H730 is balls out faster than H710. Very fast. But the H710's still hang with the same functionality and robustness. The only thing that is limiting is a layer of RAID 10 reconfiguration. This seems more of a validation problem than a controller problem, But go back 5 years and maybe the chips didn't fall quite right with the Equilogic acquisition and that missing feature is probably a bit of legacy. I wish Dell would be more forthcoming with that limitation when selling folks on how RAID 10 is superior. It is , but.....