Supermicro 4u 24 bay chassis with SAS2 expander

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kapone

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May 23, 2015
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Oh, I didn't catch that! :) +1
The spin down has almost nothing to do with the expander or the backplane. Very rarely will those two things cause an issue, as they have to pass the raw disk data back by design. It's always the host HBA or the OS/driver that is a problem.
 
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eduncan911

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FYI, the guys I've negotiated my "barebones" SC846E16 (that's the 6Gbps SAS2 Expander version, FYI) posted it on eBay for $220:

Supermicro SC846E16 R1200B BAREBONES 24 Bay 4U Server | eBay

- NO power supplies (pick up a platinum SQ of your choice! or, slap a cheap PSU u got laying around)
- NO motherboard (stick in that Core 2 Duo you got laying around, or an X10 beast of choice)
- NO raid card (bring over that IBM 1015 you cross-flashed years ago)

- YES to SAS2 backplane with Expander
- YES to fan shroud
- YES to PWM fans
- YES to all 24 drive cages

The SAS2 expander backplane alone is worth $250!

EDIT: I also picked up a pair of these for $150 (offered $150, it was accepted).

Supermicro Pro E5 PWS 741P 1R 740W 80 Plus Platinum 1U Power Supply PSU | eBay
 

Fritz

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Apr 6, 2015
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Thanks. Just bought both. Seller also accepted offer of 150 for 2 PSU's. Great deal. I've got a SC846 with SAS1 backplane in it that I plan to put back up on eBay. Now both of mine will be SAS2 and the main one should be quieter. :)
 

kapone

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I just bought a 847E16 ( the 36 bay version) with SAS2, rails, dual 1400w power supplies, all caddies of course, and...a Supermicro dual Xeon board in it (socket 1366) with dual E5620 CPUs, 24 gb Ecc ram

All for $350 shipped.
 

brendantay

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I just bought a 847E16 ( the 36 bay version) with SAS2, rails, dual 1400w power supplies, all caddies of course, and...a Supermicro dual Xeon board in it (socket 1366) with dual E5620 CPUs, 24 gb Ecc ram

All for $350 shipped.
From the Seller in OP or elsewhere?
 

eduncan911

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I see the guy raised the bare chassis from $220 to $245. Heh, must be reading this thread or seeing them sell faster than expected.

I just bought a 847E16 ( the 36 bay version) with SAS2, rails, dual 1400w power supplies, all caddies of course, and...a Supermicro dual Xeon board in it (socket 1366) with dual E5620 CPUs, 24 gb Ecc ram

All for $350 shipped.
There has been lots of great deals like that I passed up over the last few months. They pop up every once in a while. Set your "eBay interests" to a keyword like Supermicro SC846 or SC847 and check back every day on homepage.

The reason I didn't jump on any of those is I had some primary goals:

1) I wanted very low idle wattage. The heat generated from my 220W idle (now 140W idle with spin down) is annoying in the summer for where I have my setup.

2) I wanted efficient PSUs. I did not want to waste money on PSUs I don't want, nor on the weight of shipping them. The formula is low-watts PSU + Platinum = 10% efficiency closer to my idle wattage.

3) Dual LGA1366s is cheap, and I had a pair of L5640s and 24GB ECC sitting next to me. But "idle wattage" of that PCH on the X58 serious pulls upwards of 25W alone from reviews on it. Plus, the Hexcore L5640s, while only 60W TDP each, I needed to overclock to match the CPU Passmark I was shooting for on my Plex PMS + NZB Automation + 3x VMs setup I run.

4) Do not want to be exposed by IPMI.

I ended up with a E5-2690v3 12C/24T ES off of ebay and a Supermicro X10DAL-i mobo.
 
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kapone

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Oh, I don't intend to keep that motherboard, CPUs or RAM. I figure I can sell that lot for ~$150 or so, making the chassis cost me $200 :) If and when I find better power supplies, I'll sell these and get them. We may not care about 1400w power supplies, but lots of other people do.
 

eduncan911

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Yeah, but the hassle of ebay, shipping, bent pin claims, etc.

--
BTW, that X10DAL-i is a VERY special mobo (not to mention inexpensive!): I carefully read just about every Supermicro X8, X9 and X10 manual (I prefer Supermicro due to drivers and stability and warranty) looking for one special arrangement:

PCIe assignments to CPU1 and CPU2.

This was the ONLY board that:

* wires all 3 x16 PCIe 3.0 slots to CPU1 (middle slot is x8 wired)
* wires the x16 closes to the CPU, SLOT5, at full x16 data path (all others seemed to be full wired closest to the end)
* An addition x8 slot wired at x4 next to CPUs connected to the PCH.



Translation: 3-way x16 + x4 slot to run a HBA all available off of a single CPU. Not even the single CPU boards was wired like that. They seemed to have the critically limited number of PCIe slots placed where they would be covered by the dual-width GPUs. This arrangement gives you 3x X16 slots and one free x8 (wired at x4, connected to the PCH) available for your HBA card. Just-plain-perfect!

And, if that's enough, the one PCIe slot that is useless without a 2nd CPU is covered up by a dual-width GPU anyways.

Dare I say the perfect PCIe wiring? Now if they only moved the x16 1 slot closer to the CPUe like my Asus Rampage IV Black Edition so I could fit 3x full dual width GPUs in this chassis.

I looked closely at the X10DAX (Nvidia SLI license in the BIOS). But, the PCIe slot assignments was a deal breaker. And, THE COST! Ouch!

I am going to hack the X10DAL-i BIOS to embed the Nvidia SLI license (or attempt to). That kind of stuff is fun for me.

Oh, FYI, I do FAH, rastering, password cracking, Nvidia Cuda testing, occasionally Altcoin mining and more recently Tor hashing experiments.

I like having the option of moving that stuff (currently 3x Titans and 4x AMD 280s) to the server. I tried that before with my current chassis but Nvidia desktop Windows drivers ticked me off, kept crashing the system during lockups. Going Arch Linux on the next build.
 
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eduncan911

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Can you expand more on the meaning of this statement?
Without setting off too many Mr. Robot alarms... Let me provide you with some watching:


White papers:

https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/ipmi-woot13.pdf
Risks of Using the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) | US-CERT

I can't link to Tor sites here that expose the 0-day hacks for these (buffer overflows, clear-text-as-default, etc). It's basically built into most hacking packages now to auto-scan a home network for things like Keepass, BTC traffic and IPMI UDP ports/traffic, etc. The most alarming to me was even if you didn't connect a LAN cable to it, a lot of Supermicro boards were wired to share traffic with the normal LAN1 interface! Like, WTF were they thinking?
 
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Dajinn

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Without setting off too many Mr. Robot alarms... Let me provide you with some watching:


White papers:

https://jhalderm.com/pub/papers/ipmi-woot13.pdf
Risks of Using the Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) | US-CERT

I can't link to Tor sites here that expose the 0-day hacks for these (buffer overflows, clear-text-as-default, etc). It's basically built into most hacking packages now to auto-scan a home network for things like Keepass, BTC wallets and IPMI devices, etc. The most alarming to me was even if you didn't connect a LAN cable to it, a lot of Supermicro boards were wired to share traffic with the normal LAN1 interface! Like, WTF were they thinking?
Interesting, does iDRAC count as IPMI?
 

eduncan911

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Interesting, does iDRAC count as IPMI?
I think iDRAC was created in response to the exploits with IPMI, or a way for Dell to get more $$$ by forcing licensing. What scares me is iDRAC is special "Dell Only" and how much do you trust a single company to secure their closed-sourced/closed-spec'd firmware? I don't!

Honestly, the simplest protection is to not expose yourself. You only think you are secure until you're hit.
 

Dajinn

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Jun 2, 2015
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I think iDRAC was created in response to the exploits with IPMI. What scares me is iDRAC is special "Dell Only" and how much do you trust a single company to secure their closed-sourced/closed-spec'd firmware? I don't!

Honestly, the simplest protection is to not expose yourself. You only think you are secure until you're hit.
Can't a managed switch with ACL policy and VLANs be used to restrict access?
 

eduncan911

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Can't a managed switch with ACL policy and VLANs be used to restrict access?
Yep! If you want to pay for more wattage usage for another device, and the administration overhead cost (and yet another device to keep Firmware updates on).

Every device can be restricted. But I have a FT job, a family with children, etc.

Who here has restricted your IPMI UDP packets with a managed switch? 2? 5? Out of how many?

How many of you have disabled cipher-0?

The earlier versions actually open UPnP ports through your firewall:

Metasploit: A Penetration Tester's Guide to IPM... | Rapid7 Community