Dell Poweredge 2400 Hardware Questions

No, the motherboard supports U160 LVD scsi ONLY (and a CD drive/floppy drive combo through an interposer board).  As far as the PCI slots go, I'm not sure, but I'd venture toward the 3.3v answer...I'll have a look at dell's internal documentation in the morning and make another post.
Have a look at page 7 of this PDF, it shows the physical differences between 3.3v and 5v PCI slots...
http://www.digi.com/pdf/prd_msc_pcitech.pdf
by comparing pictures from the PDF and pictures from here:
http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/sigu/en/ug/inside.htm
I would concule that all the 64bit slots are 5v....however, this might just be a bad picture...I'll do some more research in the morning and post again.
good luck
jeff

when looking at pci cards and slots.

if the card has 2 notches it is a universal card adn will ran @ 3.3 or 5v

a single notch closesest to the rear edge of the card signifies 5v and corrosponding notch on the mother board will signify 5v only.

likewise a notch close to the bracket signifies 3.3v only and the corrosponding notch close to the rear edge of the sot on the mother board is 3.3v only.

a universal slot will not have any notches in the first section of the pci slot.

here is the only thign i was able to fine about the poweredge 2400
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?sku=340-2549&c=us&l=en&cs=555&category_id=2999&page=external

if this is the raid controller dell sells for this server

if you look at the large view of the picture you will see the card is keyed for 3.3v only.

so there would not be a way to place a 5v card onto this motherboard.

here is a site with pictures of the notches in teh cards adn the corrispinding voltages

http://www.fpga4fun.com/PCI1.html

also the 2400 series will have 2 standard IDE controllers on the board though they will only be ata 66

for better performance if you are planning to use IDE drives would be to put in an ata 100\133 pci ide controller

i see there are alot of these systems on ebay

yeah, nice one i was sure that it didn't, ata 66 is fine , i have a pci controller i can add, hopefully it won't cause conflict with the onboard SCSI though..?

no, that's incorrect, a poweredge 2400 does not have IDE controllers onboard...a dimension 2400 does, but that's a whole different machine.  The poweredge 2400 has the following drive interfaces:
(taken from http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/sigu/en/sm/intro.htm#tech_specs)
Diskette drive 34-pin connector for internal 3.5-inch, 1.44-MB diskette drive
Ultra/Narrow SCSI controller 50-pin connector for internal SCSI CD-ROM drive or optional tape backup units
Ultra2/LVD SCSI controller 68-pin connector for internal SCSI drives.  You would HAVE to add an IDE controller into the system if you wanted to use IDE drives.  As far as the card causing  a conflict with the onboard raid controller, its possible, all I know as far as that goes is that dell doesn't support it.
good luck
jeff

cool thanks for clearing that up, i'd be putting in a ultra160 scsi controller anyway, probably skip IDE all together, have your worked with this series of dell server jeff? how are they on reliability?

I work a lot with the big brother, the Dell PowerEdge 2650 and they are awesome, they are working has Exchange 2003 Front Ends, and they spit messages just like that, all day long, all night long, so stopping nor breaking. You can count on a good machine there !! ( By the way, just an advice : Try to get 15 K RPM disks as they Oustand the 10K RPM, a lot !!! )


Best Regards!

I'm looking at getting the just the chassey and motherboard, and i'll add my own CPU's. They are SLOT loading correct? Do i have to use Dell VRM's to do this? can i get a matched pair of Intel P3's and put em in? i know dell "encourages" you to use their upgrade kits. I'll also do this so i can install my own gig nic and ultra 160 scsi raid con.

I'm near sure this motherboard is all 5 volt for the PCI stuff.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/sigu/en/ug/inside-4.gif

Look at that pic and compare to this

http://rathmore.dyndns.biz/Public/Pix/PCI_Slots%2064%20Bit.jpg

got to be 5 volt surely..

can anyone confirm this who has one of these units avail to check?

if someone can give me a definitive answer as to whether the 64 bit PCI slots are 5v or 3.3 volt, i'll award all the points to em

regards

Owen

owen, I forgot to check today, I'll check in the morning.

cool thanks Jeff, let me know, the points is yours for the taking. Also do u reckon I could use regular generic slotket socket 370 to Slot 1 adapters to install a matched pair of regular (non-xeon) P3's on this motherboard?

Excellent thanks for the complete answer there Jeff. Much appreciated. I'll def look into getting one of these as soon the right auction comes along! I'll try to score some hi-quality slotkets (is there such a thing??) hopefully any auction i win will come with a CPU terminator as well

thanks again to everyone on helping out with the question