I'm in need of something very quiet to serve as a firewall/router device. Only doing 4 1Gbps connections and not using pfsense so I don't care that much about AES-NI.
I'm looking at:
Supermicro | Products | SuperServers | Mini 1U | E200-9A
or
Supermicro | Products | SuperServers | Mini-ITX | E200-9B
The "A" is Atom C3000 based, uses DDR4 (very expensive), and is about $410 base + RAM.
The "B" is N3700, uses DDR3 (cheaper), and is about $350 base + RAM.
The "A" can take up to 128GB of RAM, while the "B" is limited to 8GB. While 8GB is enough for what i need, I some times think about the "what if I want to do X with this in the future"... probably doesn't really matter as it'll be obsolute by then...
What matters more to me is noise level. I assume these are both fairly quiet, but what I'm replacing was completely silent. Basically, I had a similar machine that was completely silent fail on me on Friday afternoon (why always Fridays?) - just shut itself off and would never power on again. I had a spare SYS-5018A-FTN4 laying around so I replaced it temporarily with that. And as quiet as the SYS-5018A-FTN4 is, I was spoiled by the total silence of the previous machine that I'd like to find another silent replacement.
So, has anyone used of these machines? The "B" looks like it is fanless... not sure though. The "A" definitely has 2 fans...
Thoughts?
I'm looking at:
Supermicro | Products | SuperServers | Mini 1U | E200-9A
or
Supermicro | Products | SuperServers | Mini-ITX | E200-9B
The "A" is Atom C3000 based, uses DDR4 (very expensive), and is about $410 base + RAM.
The "B" is N3700, uses DDR3 (cheaper), and is about $350 base + RAM.
The "A" can take up to 128GB of RAM, while the "B" is limited to 8GB. While 8GB is enough for what i need, I some times think about the "what if I want to do X with this in the future"... probably doesn't really matter as it'll be obsolute by then...
What matters more to me is noise level. I assume these are both fairly quiet, but what I'm replacing was completely silent. Basically, I had a similar machine that was completely silent fail on me on Friday afternoon (why always Fridays?) - just shut itself off and would never power on again. I had a spare SYS-5018A-FTN4 laying around so I replaced it temporarily with that. And as quiet as the SYS-5018A-FTN4 is, I was spoiled by the total silence of the previous machine that I'd like to find another silent replacement.
So, has anyone used of these machines? The "B" looks like it is fanless... not sure though. The "A" definitely has 2 fans...
Thoughts?