SC846 system gifted to me - A full overview with questions. Replacing DVD drive with SSDs? Ideas for upgrades or keep what I got?
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From memory, the slots not tall enough, the mounts are in the wrong place and there’s no power connection. All fixable with various levels of effort.
Supermicro site lists compatible chassis and provides some images that will help.
Supermicro site lists compatible chassis and provides some images that will help.
Yeah all good. It's fine really, I can just use 2x of the side mount kits which look like it should work if I remove the DVD drive. If I do that though I'd like to blank out the DVD drive slot and I'm trying to figure out what part number that might be for a slab of metal.
I hadn't seen that board before.
One thing that I hate about LGA3647 is that there are literally a dozen CPU SKUs that fit the criteria you might have (exact number of cores, TDP, single core performance, etc.). It's really hard to search for that many variants so you can price compare.
And, the numbering doesn't match what you'd expect. For example the Xeon Silver 4215 has 8 cores, while the 4214 has 12 cores. Historically, Intel has given higher numbers to CPUs with overall higher performance, but that's not the case here. And, it's not as simple as max turbo or single core performance, either, as the 4214, 4215, and 4216 numbering show. The 4216 has top performance because of the 16 cores, but the 4215 has better single core, while the 4214 has better overall performance than the 4215. Very confusing.
Then, some processors have up to 3 variants, like the 4214, 4214R, and 4214Y.
Last, unless you can afford the top end Xeon Gold or Platinum on LGA3647, the 2011 socket v4 are by far the price/performance leaders.
Intel's marketing department seems to have just given up and started assigning random part numbers to CPUs by Skylake, and the Cascade Lake R models are even more annoying, but for the most part the suffix letters are either clear or not worth paying attention to. Still, the price difference to Broadwell is just in the board, since a 6132 costs pretty much the same as the e5 2680 v4, but all I meant was that the X11SRL with a W2100 series CPU costs more for the same processing power, unless you really need the single thread speed.
oh interesting. the description says that's for CSE-825. I'll be able to test the 826 top covers I have on an 846 tonight. If I have 2 that fit I will be happy to send you one for shipping and the cost of a beverage of my choice.
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Yeah I only noticed the part number when looking at newer chassis they are currently selling. Under the SuperChassis 846BE1C8-R1K23B4 product page it has an included parts list which shows it's the same panel for many models which I suspected would be the case.oh interesting. the description says that's for CSE-825. I'll be able to test the 826 top covers I have on an 846 tonight. If I have 2 that fit I will be happy to send you one for shipping and the cost of a beverage of my choice.
It has 846, 825, 826 and more there so... Hey should work! I hope haha.
And you got yourself a deal!
| Part(s) | MCP-230-82501-0N | 1 | Top cover for SC213,216,825,826,835,836,936,846 |
Now before you get too excited about a freebie. You may want to try and source the cover and see what the shipping is from a reseller (or SM eStore). The box to ship the cover from my perspective needs to be pretty tall with many layers of bubble wrap around the cover to protect it. UPS charges by box size and weight. would not surprise me if I get a quote for $75-$100USD to ship this anywhere in the USA since a whole server in a bespoke shipping box is about $150USD. Add in the $2.17USD for the extra large Gulp from the seven oh eleven and maybe a donut so we'll call it $3.80USD... or potentially $78.80 - $103.80 at a guess ;-).And you got yourself a deal!
Proof of life.
top cover from donor cse-826. First pic is the cover installed in an 846. Second pic is the bent top cover inverted on top of the donor cover.
Oh yikes didn't think about that did I lolNow before you get too excited about a freebie. You may want to try and source the cover and see what the shipping is from a reseller (or SM eStore). The box to ship the cover from my perspective needs to be pretty tall with many layers of bubble wrap around the cover to protect it. UPS charges by box size and weight. would not surprise me if I get a quote for $75-$100USD to ship this anywhere in the USA since a whole server in a bespoke shipping box is about $150USD. Add in the $2.17USD for the extra large Gulp from the seven oh eleven and maybe a donut so we'll call it $3.80USD... or potentially $78.80 - $103.80 at a guess ;-).
Proof of life.
top cover from donor cse-826. First pic is the cover installed in an 846. Second pic is the bent top cover inverted on top of the donor cover.
Well I guess I should look at local resellers there's a ton in the area.
Do you really need 2x MCP-220-84603-0N? I didn't think that would fit even without the rear CDROM bracket. In mine, I am running the slimline DVD and I have the MCP-220-84603-0N bracket which let me install 2x 2.5" internal drives.
I am doing something very similar to you, except what I did is I installed XCP-NG on the 2x 2.5" internal drives SSDs using a software RAID1. I then created a TrueNAS VM where-in I setup hardware pass-through for the SAS HBA controllers to that VM, which gives exclusive direct hardware access to all the front hot-swap drives to the TrueNAS system where-in I then configured all my other storage for the rest of my network (including NFS and iSCSI for other VM's such as Rocky Linux, CentOS, etc, hosted on the SC846 server via XCP-NG).
There are benefits and drawbacks to this configuration. The main drawback simply being that I am limited in the local storage space for VM's by the internal 2.5" drives. But the benefits is that I am using a much more optimized virtualization platform in XCP-NG than using TrueNAS be the hypervisor. I get around the local storage drawbacks by mainly using NFS mounted areas for the majority of my data (compiling software or installing things under a different prefix so that it does not use the local disks where-ever I can).
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Unless you're totally out of free PCIe slots you can always add NVMe for that kind of use, AIC form factor or m.2 on adapter cards conveniently require no mounts or wiring.
No, probably not. Just want to use the space I have just cuz ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I was able to get a BPN-SAS2-846EL1 pretty cheap to replace my BPN-SAS-846TQ backplane (still waiting for it in the mail). I'm Trying to pick up a new single HBA that I can use now and in the future. To the end I was thinking of getting the AOC-S3008L-L8E. I should be able tot cable it with 2x SFF-8643 to SFF-8087 connections to the ELI1 and if by chance I can come across a SAS3 backplane in the future (bpn-sas3-846EL1?) I'd already have an HBA ready to go. While I I know starting out with all spinning disks means I wouldn't be able to utilize the bandwidth I'm just future thinking if I ever end up wanting to use a pool of SSDs I'd want to consider this futureproofing.
Does the above make sound sense or am I mistaken? Any caveats I may be missing? There's about 10 zillion HBAs with all different controllers (I literally started making a spreadsheet to track everything because of this lol) so let me know if my choice is trash or if I'm missing something.
For my board I am thinking a X10SRI-F just for cost really (they're super cheap). I don't have a lab setup at all and I need to build up a lot of basics first so I want to put my cost there for now. For example I grabbed a 25U StarTech rack brand new for $100 which seemed like a great deal. (Here it is on Amazon for $277.99). I'd also like to get a rack mount UPS (or multiple) and a managed gigabit switch (recommendations appreciated). I feel like a UPS is a requirement in case of power loss so my NAS can shut down gracefully. Not 100% sure how that all works (NUT?) so feel free to chime in on recommendations, I'd love to hear them.
Still need memory too if I'm going with the X10SRI-F... I know speed isn't as important as just having a bunch of capacity but I'm not 100% sure how much I need. I know the more the better. For CPU I am thinking the E5-2667 V4 looks pretty good as was reccomended by @itronin.
As for X11 and newer platforms, while obvioously cool- I don't think I actually need it unless anyone wants to convince me otherwise. I remind myself that the use case I'm trying to focus on is NAS capability first and not so much VMs or scale containers. Instead of trying to make an awesome all-in-one box I'd eventually ike to make a proxmox server instead for that kind of work which I could focus on ensuring has high core count instead of that being on my TrueNAS box. I think it makes sense to keep them as seperate pieces of equipment entirely. By the way if anyone wants to chime in on proxmox build recommendations I'm all ears- I have not touched proxmox before (only VMWare for work) so I'm interested in that being my next project after I stand up a lab and the NAS.
As an aside to the above point I still have been looking out for a X11SPI-F and even a X12SPI-TF board just in case something crazy cheap appeared. I came across what looked like to be a great deal for a whole X11 build using a X11SPI-TF and Xeon Platinum 8153. However I look at that 8153 and think "Do I really want or need that?" and I'm leaning towards no, not really- doesn't seem like the right fit for my NAS focused use case.
Good line of thinking? Anything flawed? Feedback always appreciated thanks guys.
Does the above make sound sense or am I mistaken? Any caveats I may be missing? There's about 10 zillion HBAs with all different controllers (I literally started making a spreadsheet to track everything because of this lol) so let me know if my choice is trash or if I'm missing something.
For my board I am thinking a X10SRI-F just for cost really (they're super cheap). I don't have a lab setup at all and I need to build up a lot of basics first so I want to put my cost there for now. For example I grabbed a 25U StarTech rack brand new for $100 which seemed like a great deal. (Here it is on Amazon for $277.99). I'd also like to get a rack mount UPS (or multiple) and a managed gigabit switch (recommendations appreciated). I feel like a UPS is a requirement in case of power loss so my NAS can shut down gracefully. Not 100% sure how that all works (NUT?) so feel free to chime in on recommendations, I'd love to hear them.
Still need memory too if I'm going with the X10SRI-F... I know speed isn't as important as just having a bunch of capacity but I'm not 100% sure how much I need. I know the more the better. For CPU I am thinking the E5-2667 V4 looks pretty good as was reccomended by @itronin.
As for X11 and newer platforms, while obvioously cool- I don't think I actually need it unless anyone wants to convince me otherwise. I remind myself that the use case I'm trying to focus on is NAS capability first and not so much VMs or scale containers. Instead of trying to make an awesome all-in-one box I'd eventually ike to make a proxmox server instead for that kind of work which I could focus on ensuring has high core count instead of that being on my TrueNAS box. I think it makes sense to keep them as seperate pieces of equipment entirely. By the way if anyone wants to chime in on proxmox build recommendations I'm all ears- I have not touched proxmox before (only VMWare for work) so I'm interested in that being my next project after I stand up a lab and the NAS.
As an aside to the above point I still have been looking out for a X11SPI-F and even a X12SPI-TF board just in case something crazy cheap appeared. I came across what looked like to be a great deal for a whole X11 build using a X11SPI-TF and Xeon Platinum 8153. However I look at that 8153 and think "Do I really want or need that?" and I'm leaning towards no, not really- doesn't seem like the right fit for my NAS focused use case.
Good line of thinking? Anything flawed? Feedback always appreciated thanks guys.
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First, no reason to pay extra for the Supermicro-branded LSI HBA, these Inspur cards work just fine: Inspur LSI SAS3008 12Gbps SAS HBA RAID Controller Card P/N:YZCA-00424-101 Tested | eBay (note there may be better prices available, I didn't look too hard.)
I find some good stuff from this ebay seller, I've heard that you generally want to avoid APC because they abuse the batteries a little too much, also look for a network port if you want to monitor them that way, and keep in mind that an online/double-conversion UPS is going to use a certain amount of power and probably run fans constantly: | eBay
If it's a good deal on the board/cpu cooler you can always sell the 8153 and spend $30 on a different Skylake CPU.
x10sri-f is good if you can get a deal. having the heatsink with it is one less thing, likely be 2U passive heatsink so need the platsic airdam for the 846, that board has narrow ILM - important for heatsink. without the airdam them look for maybe an active noctua or a 4U supermicro/dynatron narrow ILM heatsink - they will all have about the same sound level. Just check the installed height of any "tall" cooler.
memory. should be $1USD or less per Gig. Unless you are trying to sequeeze every little bit of perf out of this simply go big with fewer sticks. that way you aren't tossing memory down the road if you decide you want more. that said 32GB sticks x2 or x4 to start is probably plenty even for an all-in-one systerm which you seem to be building.
as nexox said no need to get SM branded LSI controller though they are tanks (check out those caps). SAS3 HBA and mixed type cables is smart so definmitely do that.
rack. check the max depth you can set that rack - check the min depth of SM rails if you are using those kinds of rails and configure the star tech's depth accordingly day one. If you are using L brackets - okay. Just realize you may lose a U above the server depending on how thick the l brackets are.
Yeah completely understood, they're all generally the same price though as far as I can tell. I was mostly concerned with the actual controller type.
It was listed for $500 but they were willing to sell for $450+shipping. X11SPi-TF, Xeon 8153, SK Hynix 4x32GB 128GB DDR4 ECC RAM PC4-2666, and Noctua NH-D9 DX-3647. What do you think? Good deal in your opinion? Am I nuts for hesitating?
Thanks for the guidance on memory pricing. Doubled ok on the controller. Again like I said just wanted to make sure that choice on controller makes sense or if I should look at anything else. Seems like the right deal.
Will do on checking the rack stats. Amazon says it can go up to 40" depth. I have the yellow label SuperMicro rails I believe- will cross check.