Fujitsu TX1320 M3 - Cheap low power server (barebone)

[slowlaris]

Merry Christmas everyone!

So I've decided to bite the bullet and go with SAS HDDs for the time being, main rationale being the price: while all-SSD pool sounds nice, prices are eye-watering: at least 100 EUR for a used 2TB drive and yes, I've checked various discounts and Black Friday sales...

After scouring eBay I've settled on a lot of 6 disks for ~45 EUR each; I know I could find them cheaper but I was attracted to the listing photos featuring drives made in 2019; to much dismay a little surprise was waiting for me when I opened the box: only one of the drives was made in 2019, and the rest turned out to be from 2015... I'll try to open a dispute with the seller, because it's a bit of a scam in my opinion.

Anyway, then I had to swap HBA again because of the cable issue - old cables which I had were blocking drive fans, and I realized with SAS disks I do need to use stock fans. I've settled on Dell HBA 350i - same LSI3808 chip, but Dell branded. ASPM is not enabled by default but gets enabled after running ASPM script: GitHub - notthebee/AutoASPM: A script that automatically activates ASPM for all supported devices on Linux. I was also able to test drive spindown with this: GitHub - adelolmo/hd-idle: Hard Disk Idle Spin-Down Utility.

I've got following the measurements:
25W (2 DIMMs, HBA, 1 SATA SSD)
35W 8 SAS HDDs spun down
60W when SAS disks are active

I plan to configure hd-idle to spin down after 2 hours of inactivity, should be plenty for my use case. I think 35W is not too bad for 10 TBs in RAIDz2...

 

[slowlaris]

Another interesting thing is that running `ipmitool sensor`, HBA card is not detected by IPMI (and is not visible in iRMC). As a consequence of this, drive temps are only retrievable via smart tools, and I suspect that's why backplane fan is spinning at minimal RPM. I think BMC has "Fujitsu" hardcoded there and just won't recognize any other card (despite card working perfectly).

I think it should be possible to reflash this Dell HBA 350i to equivalent Fujitsu card, after all, only disk connectors are different.

 

[slowlaris]

And finally regarding fan swap: I think it's not worth the effort. I've got a box of Arctic 4028 fans (both 6K and 15K), and 15K seems to be the only fully matching option for the PSU; both 6K and Noctua (which is shorter by 8mm and capable of 5K) will be flagged as degraded or broken by a braindead BMC. Needless to say 15K one not only would sound like a jet engine, but also would be very annoying at low RPM.

Yet another approach could be Sunon MagLev fans, but their only 4028 model is just DC, and PWM ones are 20mm thick and max out at 8K RPM...