Fast 15,000-rpm SCSI drives are fine performers. Intelligent status light on front and back panels. 

Hard drives are neither front-panel accessible nor hot-swappable. Server is loud.

While it isn't cheap for a single-processor 1U server, the Dell PowerEdge 750 earns its price tag with some true hard-drive horsepower.

The Dell PowerEdge 750 is a server on a mission. If your needs call for hard drive horsepower rather than multi-CPU muscle, this configuration earns... click here for

The Dell PowerEdge 750 is a server on a mission. If your needs call for hard drive horsepower rather than multi-CPU muscle, this configuration earns its $3,544 (direct) price tag.

Built around a single Prescott-based 2.8-GHz Pentium 4 processor, the PowerEdge 750's 1U case can accommodate two hard drives. For this review, Dell sent a pair of 36GB 15,000-rpm SCSI U320 drives in a RAID Level 0 configuration. You can save a bundle by replacing these drives with SATA ones, thanks to the two available SATA interfaces on the motherboard. But if your server requirements call for frequent disk access—such as in database, high-use Web cache, or file-serving applications—the SCSI setup is the way to go. The PowerEdge 750's near-enterprise-class performance on our NetBench test is eye-opening, hitting a peak throughput of 1,084 Mbps (megabits per second) when taxed by 20 virtual clients. On our WebBench static test, throughput ramped all the way up to 144 million bytes per second at 32 clients.

The blue status indicator lights on the front and back panel are a nice touch we'd like to see on more 1U servers. If there is a server fault (like an open-chassis detection or a fan failure), the blue LED lighting up on both the front and back panel will let you know which server to attend to in a rack. A linked button lets you either turn off the LEDs after you've dealt with a problem or turn them on to help ID a server when you walk to the back of the rack. The light can also be activated by Dell's OpenManage systems management software, allowing, for example, a tech in Tulsa to show a salesperson in DeWitt which of two servers to power down and ship to the home office. The PowerEdge 750 is also available in a tower configuration as the PowerEdge 700. Both share the same motherboard and main internals, although the PowerEdge 700 has more expansion room. The PowerEdge 750 will make a fine local file server or a Web-caching server, and its 1U form factor is ideal for space-constrained areas.