The Great Unexpandable Dell
January 09, 2007

As my regular readers know, I've recently had a server death. It wasn't a complete melt-down, but the main O/S disk died. I seized this situation as a great chance to migrate my main server functions over to the much faster Dell Dimension that's been sitting in my apartment running OSX and feeling unused. I finished getting all of my server services setup towards the end of finals week and only recently have moved on to migrating my array of hard disks...

This array of hard disks is comprised of one 80G disk, one 100G disk, and one 120G disk. Imagine all of this and the one O/S disk running on an old Athlon 700 and you can have a short laugh that it ran as long as it did. Well, I cracked the Dimension's case to install these new disks and was instantly depressed...

There was one slot for a hard disk - the O/S disk. Well, that leaves me with two choices now. I have to decide whether to buy three external USB enclosures which stand to let me add extra disks with ease. Or, I could pony up the cash for a new 300G Sata disk for my main workstation which is now running on an old IDE disk. The first solution costs me around $40 while the second can cost me all the way up to $90, but it speeds up my main workstation and allows me quick access to my file-shares on the station from which I access them the most.

So, the moral of the story? Don't buy a Dell and expect to upgrade. At all.