HP ProLiant DL160 Gen9 1U rack server E5-2603v3 1.6GHz 8GB 8x 146GB SAS H240

Compact 1U rack server for density-focused workloads

The HP ProLiant DL160 Gen9 fits a single Intel Xeon E5-2603v3 six-core processor at 1.6GHz with 8GB of DDR4 ECC memory into a 1U chassis. Eight 2.5-inch SAS drive bays are populated with 146GB 15K drives behind an H240 controller supporting RAID 0, 1 and 5. Redundant hot-swap power supplies and a Matrox G200 GPU complete a platform aimed at general-purpose cloud and virtualisation tasks where rack space is at a premium.

Upgrade path from single-socket

This unit ships with one CPU installed but the socket count supports a second Xeon E5 v3 or v4 processor, raising the core ceiling to 36 total. Memory scales across 16 DIMM slots to a 1TB maximum using registered DDR4 up to 2400MT/s, so the 8GB starting point is a baseline rather than a limit. The eight-bay SFF cage can be expanded by two more drives or a universal media bay, letting storage grow without leaving the 1U footprint.

Practical limits of the 6Gbps SAS interface

The installed 15K SAS drives operate at 6Gbps, while the H240 controller is capable of 12Gbps SAS and 6Gbps SATA; the drives set the effective throughput ceiling. RAID 5 rebuild times on 146GB spindles are short, but the array lacks the write-endurance and latency profile of solid-state media, so write-heavy databases will saturate the spindle IOPS before the controller bandwidth. The 550W redundant supply caps total platform power, constraining how many high-wattage CPUs or additional drives can be added simultaneously.