We rounded up some of the questions we've gotten from our customers that we thought you might want to know the answers to, too. In this edition of Customer Questions corner, we covered a server that could support over 60 virtual machines, an Xbox One / NAS scenario, and more interesting questions from you.
“For an R730, can I have a titanium 750w PSU as the primary and a 750w platinum as the ...
When it comes to types of server hard drives, there are so many variations out there that it can become challenging to keep track of all the considerations. "Can my server read a 4Kn drive?" "Can I mix SAS and SATA drives in the same machine?" "What about SSDs versus HDDs?"
While we've written extensively on hard drives, we thought it would be helpful to summarize all the types, formats, and ...
A flex bay is a type of modular bay designed for… you guessed it, flexibility! Using a flex bay, you can house different types of storage, such as hard drives (HDDs) or Solid State Disks (SSDs). It's a neat feature to have if you want to be able to easily upgrade your server's capabilities as your own needs grow (without having to go through the hassle of setting up a totally new machine). In...
We often are asked by our customers for more details on our refurbished hard drives. “How long have they been running? How many bytes have been written? Are there any bad sectors?” Since we already covered the myths and misconceptions about refurbished hard drives in a previous blog post, we thought it would be helpful to share the objective metrics we use to quantify our drives before we...
On occasion, we get a customer querying us who wishes to buy a SAS drive and wonder if they can install that drive into their personal PC.
We can understand where they are coming from: SAS drives are universally better than their SATA counterparts, both in terms of reliability and transfer speeds. So then, if SAS is better, and it comes in the same 2.5” or 3.5” form factor, why can’t I just...
Call us gearheads, but at TechMikeNY, we’re fascinated by all of the hardware and parts of an enterprise server. We often field questions from our customers on cable compatibility, specifically the many variables with Dell backplane cables.
To better inform, we thought it would be helpful to describe the nuances of these backplane cables. Call it Server Anatomy 101: Know Your Backplane Cab...
In the world of IT acronyms, nothing sounds more like a Marvel supervillain than "JBOD." No, JBOD is not a criminal mastermind bent on world domination (as far as we know) but a non-RAID storage architecture that maximizes the volume of its drives, so the total disk space is the sum of its drives.
So what is a JBOD? If the above sounds complicated, know that "J.B.O.D" stands for "Just a B...
At TechMikeNY, we are all about capitalizing the value of IT equipment to its maximum. Why throw something out when it has potentially years of production still in it? When you consider the growing issue of e-waste, it’s a no-brainer that both the consumer and the global population benefit from quality refurbished IT equipment.
As you’ll see in this post, nothing fits this bill more than r...
At TechMikeNY, a big part of what we sell are Enterprise rack servers. A big part of servers is RAID. (If RAID is a new concept to you, read our blog post here, which is a handy primer.) Since so many of our customer questions revolve around RAID configurations and trouble-shooting, we thought it would be a good idea to put down some typical RAID array server Do’s and Don’ts which can serv...
