Recent content by Tsmooth3

There might be other ways, but I believe this would work: 6 Cable SATA harness to connect onboard SATA ports to interposer board SATA ports (part no. is somewhere in this thread) Special Dell SFF-8087 + SGPIO to 4x SATA from midplane MB1/2 HDD1~4 -> backplane Drives 1-4 (part no. might be...

I believe all 12 drives are powered on when one of the nodes is powered on just like all fans are). You won't see any activity lights, but it has been my experience that the drives are on and visible to the OS.

Correct. Current plan is to make node 1 a ZFS storage node, and boot esxi from usb on the other nodes and present iscsi/nfs storage to them.

The cable from Port 1 is .75m and has slack to spare. You're right about the other one though. I had a .75m one in port 0 and it is too short. Too much stress on the cable/card so I've ordered a 1m for that port.

Bypass the midplane and connect directly to the backplane using SFF-8087 to 4x SATA forward breakout cable. I have two .75m cables (I think) and it's a tight fit, but it works, so 1m cables would probably be bettter. You can fish the cables along the side of the node tray (easiest if you pull...

Rails and one power supply were included. Didn't realize there was a separate thread for the USB stuff. My apologies for not looking (this thread is getting quite long I suppose). I'll hop over there and catch up. Thanks!

Blank drive caddies I don't think it's been mentioned yet, but the blank drive caddies that came with the server can be used with 3.5" drives. Just unscrew the plastic tray, and screw in your hard drive. You don't get the activity lights, or the lock, but it would be fine for a home lab. The...

I bought mine from this ebayer: lextecny2012 It seemed to be the best value (4 node, 96GB ram total, 8xL5520, 4x250GB drives), free shipping and came with 60 day warranty. I got several friends to go in together on an order of 6 and we got a slight discount. One server was damaged during...

What about the "usb key" box on the interposer board? There's also an 8-pin connector hidden under the pci-e riser labeled USB. And does anyone know what the white 4-pin IPMB connector between CPU0 and memory DIMMs is for? Could power possibly be drawn from there? I've...