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October 26, 2006

hardware

Apple serve up Xserves for pre-order, delivery in November

Posted Oct. 26, ’06, 8:11 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Hardware

newxserve.jpgBeen waiting for your spanking new Xeon-based Xserve? Settle down, sparky. It’s going to be a little while yet. Apple’s delayed the ship dates on the new rack-mount servers to November. The good news is that you can officially place your pre-orders at the Apple Store now.

Like the Mac Pro, the Xserve is being offered in one basic configuration: two 2.0GHz Xeons, a 1.33GHz FSB, 4MB L2 cache per processor, 1GB DDR2 RAM, 80GB 7200-rpm SATA drive, Radeon X1300 GPU with 64MB RAM, two FireWire 800 ports, a FireWire 400 port, two USB2.0 ports, dual Gigabit Ethernet ports, and, of course, OS X server. Configuration options abound: you can swap the 2.0GHz processors for a pair of 2.66GHz chips or 3.0GHz, should the fancy strike you. RAM is expandable up to drool-inducing 32GB, at a cost of $23,699 or, should you prefer to measure it differently, more than my life is currently valued.

It seems, though, that some upgrades are more equal than others. Take the matter of the Xserve’s three hard drive bays. It ships standard with the 80GB drive in bay 1; the options are to bump that to a 73GB Serial Attached SCSI drive spinning at a head-reeling 15,000rpm, a 750GB 7200rpm SATA drive, or a 300GB 15,000rpm SCSI drive. The prices for those upgrades are $299, $499, and $799 respectively for bay 1. However, if you’d like to add any of those drives to bay 2 or bay 3 they’ll cost you $499, $699, or $999 respectively. Adding an 80GB SATA drive to bay 2 or bay 3 will cost you $200. Given that respectable 7200rpm SATA drives at capacities of 300GB or more go for under $100 from third-party retailers, buying SATA storage from Apple is not necessarily a terribly attractive option.

Other Xserve-specific options include a second, redundant backup power supply for $199 and an AppleCare Service Parts Kit for $999, including a spare logic board, power supply, and fan assembly. Frankly, I love the idea of putting a rackmount server somewhere in my house, and nobody ever really comes over, so that coat closet is really just a waste of space.


1 Comments

Jesse said:

It seems that Apple is no longer offering a Hardware RAID card with the Xserve. So they are forcing you to purchase and XRAID if you want to do any type of RAID level 5. Of course you can do mirroring in the Disk Utility (But its still not RAID level 5). They have surely taken away something that was a big deal to a lot of customers. Which is, the need to not require an external RAID.

October 26, 2006 10:02 AM

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