I bought myself an HP ML110G5 with dual core Xeon, four 250gb non-hot swap Sata drives of the new HP Midline range and bumped the ram up to 6GB. Also comes with a next business day 3 year on-site support contract.

This will be my new ‘production’ server once I also get an ML310 or 350 for testing with Virtual machines etc. At the moment it has SBS 2008RC0 on it running just fine, well apart from the DNS issues I blogged about!

The cost of this small but perfectly formed beast? All in just over £700! I might even get another with less drives and memory as the base machine with 1GB ram and a 160GB Sata HD comes in at about £180.

For those of you who do Dell (you know who you are   and not HP, take another look. Excellent build quality and for me, the killer is onboard Sata raid 1. Yes….I can hear the screams already But compared to the dell small servers which don’t have any onboard raid controller, this is a significant advantage. It is a proper and tested Adaptec controller chip. I do not need anything more. If I did, I could get the HP Smart Array E200/128 for £200 or any of the HP range of controllers. Remember this server only has 4 drive bays.

The debate about Sata vs SAS and onboard vs Raid controller card with memory and possibly battery backup will rage for a while if I have anything to do with it