Is this Supermicro 847 36-bay a good deal?

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BLinux

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one of the companies I work with contacted me this morning. they offered me a Supermicro 847 36-bay server, shipped to me for $234. It has the 846A and 826A backplanes. It's got a X8 motherboard and 3x Marvell based RAID cards I think; none of that matters as much as the chassis itself. I was considering this as a swap out for one of my 846 servers, so I can have an extra 12-bays in the rear for testing drives and what not.

Is this a good deal? Any drawbacks having a 847 vs 846? the 847 has 7x fans vs the 3x fans + 2 rear fans of the 846 right? Is it significantly louder?
 
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Aestr

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Great deal assuming it's what you need. It does have 7 fans, but with proper control wasn't much louder IMO. Worth noting is that the space for the motherboard is only 2U so you'll need half height cards or a riser if it has the WIO style rear window.

What I really love about this chassis is that you can swap the rear 12 drive backplane with a bpn-sas3-826a-n4 to get 4 NVME drives.
 
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Rand__

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Its 2u usable vs 4u usable though... also the backward drives get hot easily. Else its nice to have more capacity:)
 

BLinux

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Great deal assuming it's what you need. It does have 7 fans, but with proper control wasn't much louder IMO. Worth noting is that the space for the motherboard is only 2U so you'll need half height cards or a riser if it has the WIO style rear window.

What I really love about this chassis is that you can swap the rear 12 drive backplane with a bpn-sas3-826a-n4 to get 4 NVME drives.
Ok. now that's got my interest! You guys are no good at discouraging people from buying server gear... I should have known! :p

However, the 826A backplane is a 12x 3.5" HDD format, but isn't the one you're talking about a 216A-N4 backplane? the one with 24x 2.5" form factor?
 

BLinux

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Its 2u usable vs 4u usable though... also the backward drives get hot easily. Else its nice to have more capacity:)
hmmm... should be okay with 5400RPM drives? just avoid the high rpm hot HDDs; then should be okay?

how much hotter are we talking about?
 

Aestr

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It will partly depend on what you do with the fan speeds, but usually it's a non-issue. They'll run a few degrees hotter, but well within spec.
 

BLinux

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@Aestr actually, now that i think about it... the 7 fans in the midplane... are the 4 FANS immediately behind the backplane driven from the backplane itself? And then the 3 FANS closer to the motherboard driven by the motherboard? If so, fans driven by backplane provide very little fan control, no? I've heard JBOD cases where the fans were driven by the backplane being very loud...
 

Rand__

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You always can work with splitters and extensions (depending on how many fan controls your mobo has).

The back drives are a bit away from the fans and thus are not as well covered as the front drives. Whether you'll be fine depends on the total heat in the chassis (as the back drives get excess heat from the inside o/c)
 

Aestr

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The leads on all of the fan cables are long enough to reach the motherboard. Many have enough headers, but as @Rand__ mentioned you can also use splitters.
 

nthu9280

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I would say your's is much sweeter deal than what I have seen in quite a while.
eBay seller digitalmind2000 (PC Server & Parts) has been auctioning 847's 1 at a time. Many of them have sold for ~160 + shipping. They appear without the hot swap trays (from the pictures) so that's an $75-$100 additional cost putting them $300-$350 range. I debated for a bit but I don't want to get thrown out of the home.
 

frogtech

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Does this seller have quantities available? I'm pretty interested in them at that price.
 

T_Minus

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Great deal assuming it's what you need. It does have 7 fans, but with proper control wasn't much louder IMO. Worth noting is that the space for the motherboard is only 2U so you'll need half height cards or a riser if it has the WIO style rear window.

What I really love about this chassis is that you can swap the rear 12 drive backplane with a bpn-sas3-826a-n4 to get 4 NVME drives.
Well that will bring some new life into those chassis :) Now I just need to find another!

Thanks for this.
 

SniperCzar

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I would say your's is much sweeter deal than what I have seen in quite a while.
eBay seller digitalmind2000 (PC Server & Parts) has been auctioning 847's 1 at a time. Many of them have sold for ~160 + shipping. They appear without the hot swap trays (from the pictures) so that's an $75-$100 additional cost putting them $300-$350 range. I debated for a bit but I don't want to get thrown out of the home.
Over double that now. I got excited to snatch one up for cheap but it seems a certain somebody drove the demand sky high...

Hopefully the nvme backplane prices don't take a similar hike as I'm eyeing one for my own long term plans for this chassis as well.
 

T_Minus

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Over double that now. I got excited to snatch one up for cheap but it seems a certain somebody drove the demand sky high...

Hopefully the nvme backplane prices don't take a similar hike as I'm eyeing one for my own long term plans for this chassis as well.
The irony here is those ebay prices for the backplane ARE already stupid over priced ;)
;) PM me if you want one cheaper, can trade for parts too.
 
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