Buying advice for DL380 G3

[bocajoe]

Going to look at a HP DL380 G3 locally with no knowledge with servers. The machine has (2) 3GHZ Xeons,(4)36GB drives and 2GB Ram. Is there any diagnostic software I can download to test machine before purchasing?

Any other advice is more than welcome!!!!

[Ed Meadows · Accepted solution]

Yes - SmartStart has extensive testing routines that will reveal gross problems. You can get SmartStart from the HP website. Here's a reduced-length link to get there: http://tinyurl.com/cj5n7f

One note of caution with the diagnostic routines in SmartStart - they test the disk drives and memory at a high level, but latent flaws will slip through, such as surface flaws on disks.

I ran repeated tests on a DL380 G3 two weeks ago for half a day before loading an O/S and everything checked out fine. Shortly after loading Windows 2003 Server on the box, one of the hot-swap U320 drives died.

So, while SmartStart is not perfect, it is a good start for a box with no O/S.

Be aware that a DL380 G3 is an energy hog and is noisy. At CPU idle with six hot-swap U320 drives spinning the box draws 380 watts.

[Ed Meadows]

One additional note - if you decide to purchase this server you will want to have SmartStart anyway to install whatever O/S you decide upon.

SmartStart has routines that act as an O/S installer "shell" which makes it very easy to install the O/S as opposed to doing it manually.

[bocajoe]

Thanks a bunch for the link and advice. I wasn't going to pick it up, but for the price I just couldn't refuse. It's not as loud as I thought but it's no desktop.

Anyways I guess I got a new toy!