Lenovo ThinkServer TD350 review

Lenovo’s ThinkServer TD350 tower server delivers a radical redesign and a big hardware package for the price

IT Pro Verdict

Lenovo’s new ThinkServer TD350 is vastly superior to its predecessors as it’s far better built and designed. It teams up a big storage capacity with the versatile AnyRAID controllers, is much more manageable and it’s good value as well

Reasons to buy
  • +

    Very good value; Excellent design; Big storage capacity; Improved deployment and system management tools

Reasons to avoid
  • -

    Energy Manager utility has limited value

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Big storage capacity

The 16-drive server on review can be upgraded to 32 SFF bays on demand. Lenovo advised us that the kit for this includes two more 8-bay hot-swap cages, a dedicated 720ix AnyRAID adapter and a PCI-Express SAS interposer card.

An optional dual SD card module can be used as a boot device although it connects via the USB bus so can only be RAIDed within the OS. You can also add a dual M.2 Flash module which has capacitor protection and support for hardware managed mirrors making it a better choice for hypervisor redundancy.

The TD350 gets you out of the starting blocks at a cracking pace as the review system was supplied with dual 8-core 2.6GHz E5-2630 v3 Xeons. The price provided to us by ServersPlus (www.serversplus.com) also includes a decent 64GB of DDR4 memory expandable to 512GB and five 300GB SAS SFF hard disks.

The embedded TDM makes light work of storage configuration and OS deployment

Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.

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