X11SCV-L or X11SCL-iF

[maierkomor]

My RasPi does a nice as a home server, but it has its limitations. Therefore I am considering of stepping up to a small box with either the X11SCV-L or the X11SCL-iF. But I have two questions, I hope somebody may be able to answer:

1) Is it possible to operate the BIOS and boot process via an RS232 connection on the X11SCV-L? Reading the manual, I got that impression, but I am not quite sure...

2) How does the X11SVC-L compare to the X11SCL-iF concerning idle power consumption? From what I have read the X11SCL-iF consumes at least 25W idling, but it has IPMI and an C242 which probably contribute a good amount to that value. Shuttle barebones with H310 seem to achieve 10W idling with an i3, so I hope the H310 based board is less power hungry.

I am considering to use a G5420 or so, but have not decided finally yet.

Any thoughts or recommendations?

Regards,
Thomas

 

[fckruegel]

I'd recommend something with IPMI hardware and an Atom 3000 procesor. These are very low-power systems (25W TDP for the SOC) and ideal for small servers or NAS.

I've got this one

A2SDi-H-TF | Motherboards | Products | Supermicro

with 8 6T SATA drives, 32G of RAM and an NVMe SSD as boot drive. The board hast 12 SATA ports and two 10G LAN ports, so it is quite capable.

fchk

 

[EffrafaxOfWug]

You'll need a box with IPMI in order to use the serial console during boot I believe, as I think only IPMI provides the SoL facilities. IPMI will generally add 3-5W to your base idle power consumption; that's unavoidable, as you're essentially running a whole separate OS-on-a-chip for the IPMI functions.

Assuming you don't need the single-threaded performance, I'd second fckruegel's recommendation of a C3000 board. On the face of it they're quite expensive in terms of computing power vs. cost but they're very well integrated and use very little power when idle. I'm a big fan of the A2SDi-8C+-HLN4F myself for light NAS/home server/virtualisation duties (as a 1Gb model it uses even less power than the 10Gb models). My own A2SDi-8C+-HLN4F idles at about 25-30W with a couple of SATA SSDs in operation. I could certainly have got that figure down lower by using a lower-wattage PSU or a direct DC converter or a picoPSU, but it's now in a case with eight HDDs so I need the available current for spin-up.

 

[maierkomor]

Hmm, I've been looking at the C3000 boards, too. But I neither need 4 LANs nor 10GB/s, as all clients are behind WiFi access-points. Bundling 2 1GB/s ports is totally enough. Additionally, my setup can do easily with 2 harddisks and 2 ssds (assuming I can attach 2 ssds in a PCI-E slot with an AOC or via SATA ports). The X11SCL-iF is absolutely fine for this, but the H310 based variant could also do, if the BIOS can redirect its output to RS232 (i.e. not Serial-Over-LAN). I plan to attach an RS232 to WiFi converter, I am building myself.

I guess the use-case of redirecting the console to RS232 without IPMI is rather seldom. So maybe I just need to give it a try...

 

[rootgremlin]

regarding the pre-boot console over serial....
all intel-supermicro boards i had heald in my hands could do that after you activeted it in the bios.

after all, supermicro makes lots of custom boards for hardware-appliances which most of them do not have any kind of video output.
and finally, all the serverboards have a fixed 9pin serial port in the atx backplate. those boards definitively have the ability to output the bios,- and preboot -screen over serial

 

[maierkomor]

Thank you for confirming that.