Pretty sure the E6400 should be SATA, you could upgrade the drive in it to an SSD for faster response/boot times and longer battery life. Should be able to throw atleast a 1TB drive in no problem. I think 2TB or 4TB was the line where you had to make sure the bios supported the larger drive.
We had something like a 4-5 year life on computers, the 6400's went away near the end of the time I was there, and I helped setup the E6410s when first came in as my 3 week temp job that turned into a workstation tech job (printers, computers, touch of networking, patch panels, etc). If something broke down, our flip phone was the one called or the proper channel was help desk. We had a pager at first too xD. Makes me feel old >,<.
We had a few super computers on site too, I think they were something like $25k and were "clients", the server was a 16 blade server (16 computers in one housing sharing resources). The blade server was going to be something like $250k. They took their physics based flow render from taking 3 weeks down to 3 days, or maybe it was 3 days down to 3 hours. Which ever it was a massive improvement from the Linux machine someone before my time built for them. Funny the Linux box was behind a door that required special access to unlock, while the 3 $25k ones ended up at the users' cubical and really anyone could go see it. Big old monster SGI boxes. Looking at pics, the case of the Octane III matches, but it wasn't a blade server, it had 2 or 3 of Nvidia's FX series graphics cards if I remember right. Basically a pretty balling server board for the time with the graphics cards that were like $5k each. Yay, old memories of my first job, only 2 jobs ago xD.
Also note, the wheels under the computer, it's not the standard width, it was about 2 computers wide, and it was so tall it wouldn't fit under the desk in the cubical or it just barely fit. I kind of remember having to adjust the height one night (midnight worker).
The blade server was something like this, drawings but you can kind of get a sense of the scale. It shows 8 power supplies, don't recall how many it really had. I'm thinking that was around the time of dual and maybe quad core CPU's, so 16x 4 cores would be 64 cores, out of this world for back then, now you can get an AMD Epyc cpu with up to 64 cores, and my current desktop has 16.
If you can't tell, I kind of liked my first job =), got a 50% pay increase to go be a database admin for a year though, then went self employed. Guy that hired me in retired, so I probably don't have an inside contact anymore. You can't get directly hired in, it's all contract workers and if you get really lucky, you get to be a direct hire. One of the new programmers at the time I talked to was fresh out of college, first programming job, $80k/year. He didn't even seem to like programming and some of the trouble shooting I helped suggest ideas (I didn't know databases back then), and I was making enough sense he fixed the problem in like 15 secs after a quick test. He was pulling the last 10 error logs but instead of pulling the logs by date and adding the data that way, he was selecting like the type of logs, joining say the app name to it, etc then ordering by date and such. I know now he was doing a full table scan on the logs table with several millions of lines. I guess that kind of what kicked my interest in databases for the job I got offered later.
