SAS Drives in Dell Precision 690

**Valdis** · 09-12-2010

Last week I have bought the Dell Precision 690 desktop PC from Ebay. It cost me about $605 along with $ 40 shipping charge. This is one of the most rocking system that I have seen in my hand. The specification is as follows.
Processor==2x XEON 5160 3.0ghz 1333fsb
Memory===4gb DDR2-5300f
Storage====4x146GB 15k SAS w\ Perc 5i raid card
Power=====1000w PSU
Video Card==nvidia quadro fx
The video card seems to be little weak but for $645 I got a outlandish transaction on ebay. When I was searching for other product in eBay I found that the other less significant equipped 690's cost for $1000-$1200. Yesterday I pulled the old SAS drives for 4x750GB WD Raid Edition HDD, so that I can get extra storage space for backups and for some other part of work. Did I done the right thing in it? Is it going to take much affect with the performance?

**Lawford** · 09-12-2010

It is good to hear that you have got the Dell Precision 690 only for $645. I think that you are going in luck. As I have gone through the specification I mentioned that it is the best specification that everyone wants. The speed of the processor is also good. The 4GB DDR2 RAM is enough to boost up the performance. The main thing is about the SAS drives. These will increases the speed of OS and its related applications installed in it. So it seems to me that you have done the wrong thing by pulling out the SAS drive. At least you should have left 2 SAS drives for OS and applications.

**Avikshit Sinha** · 09-12-2010

When I looked into the Google search I found that there is no such option below $1000 price for Dell Precision 690. It is your luck to get such a nice PC for just $645. When I looked into the specification I found everything proper other than the Graphic card. The quality of the card is much low for the current specification. If you can able to install any high end graphic card then it will really beat the Mac computers. As far as the SAS drives concern do not remove all the drives. If you have much place for HDD then just leave 2 drives for OS then attach the WD HDDs for other programs, backup and data. The OS will beautifully work in SAS.

**AzzamKhan** · 09-12-2010

The Dell Precision 690 is outfitted with up to two 64-bit Dual or Quad-Core Intel Xeon 5100 or 5300 series processors, which will a sum of up to eight implementation cores in two sockets. These processors can distribute an extensive performance boost over single processor for some of multi-threaded applications and also in multi-tasking environments. When matching the original price with Mac pro I found that it is much expensive than Mac. There is nearly $1000 difference between those two. As with use of dual xeon processor it is the better option to upgrade your HDD capacity. It is not recommended to use only SAS drives.

**Laramie** · 10-12-2010

As far as I know the SAS drives are more powerful and faster than other or SATA drives. When I concerned some 690 users they told me that they still using SAS drives along with other drives. They left these drives only for OS not for any backup or other storage purpose. So at least a single SAS drive to get better performance and to speed up the boot up sequence.