Just doing some planning before the server arrives. If it doesn’t boot off an NVME is there a convenit place I can tap off power for a SSD, using Molex spliiters or the like. I assume I can use One of the SATADOM SATA connectors for data. Trying to preserve all the bays for HDDs.
Yes, you can tap molex power off of somewhere in this exact chasis/setup.
(im pretty sure its off those GPU looking power ports that feed power up to the backplane. not the black gpu power plugs, the similar looking white ones right near the black actual gpu ones).
I might be off on the location, but there def. are molex plugs somewhere that you can split from- as im running exactly what you are a looking to do, on 3x of these servers (2x 2U and 1x 1U )
(i just cant remember where exactly i connected a molex splitter, to, to power a 80gb intel ssd as the boot disk).
btw- from those earlier in the thread trying to quite these 2U x10 boxes- i endedup using the ipmitool shell script (on a vm) on my 1U, and a noctua 20$ fan controller each on the 2x 2Us i have. I do have alot of monitoring/alerting of the temperatures in place, as the noctua fan controller does limit the max RPMs of the fans (which could cause an overheat scenario) - but this has worked great for me, without any issues in nearly 2 yrs of use.
(the noctua controller does still let the MB control the fans speeds, but has a knob that allows you to essentially "shift the fan curve" lower). I wouldn't run this (or any fan controller) setup in a datacenter or on something critical, but it works great on my homelab rack. (fwiw, by far the hottest part on my setup is the 10gNIC/4xnvme/pcie-Riser combo card (or mezzanine card) - and specifically the 10gNIC part of that card, as reported by IPMI's temps (its always 60-70c)
One other thing i did was get/use dual 750w PSUs, to replace the 1k or 1.2k PSUs (although the 1kw PSU fans werent very loud anyway, this helped with a few watts of power consumption from the wall, and quieted the psu fans a tad). I can look up the 750w psu model num if anyone cant locate it. (they are hotswap / made for this exact unique chassis)
a last point- i DEF agree with this below, RE: their higher than expected power consumption, its pretty much worth it to run 2x CPUs in these, even if you only really need 1x (in regards to their power draw).
Part of the problem is just how much power the server uses (it is aiming for top performance after all). I have a single E5-2678v3, 2 DIMMs, LSI 9341-4i, 2 SAS SSDs, and a 1TB hard drive in mine, but it still sits at ~115W with minimal load (CPU throttled to 1.2ghz).
