Xeon D-1541 Quanta storage servers on ebay

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tjk

Active Member
Mar 3, 2013
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also very tempted, but if they can't do plain sata reliably it's a no-go for me
Right now SATA is unreliable at best. No one has been able to update the expander firmware yet to test otherwise.

So, if you need sata on the 3.5" slots, I'd skip this for now.
 

bbqdt

Member
Sep 15, 2019
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is it the backplane preventing sata from working or the hba/motherboard? That mb is probably worth that price in a different case with a different backplane.
 

tekmunki

New Member
Aug 4, 2019
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Since my last post I've been running my SAS drives in the server at home and it's been solid. The HDD temps don't seem to be an issue even under heavy load at home they've stayed constant at their idle temps. I've moved close to 50TB to and from the server and I even run 15 of my VMs boot disks off of it over the 10GB connections.

I'm still on the 11.3-Release of FreeNAS though since I've been putting off the updates as I'm not sure if the controller will be affected by the changes in the U2 release in regards to the mpr drivers . I did order a few more of these servers to run at work so I'll try the update out on them once the SAS drives come in tomorrow.

The same seller that sold the SAS SED 6TB Seagate drives Sleyk posted a few weeks ago was willing to sell me 24 more 0 hour ones @$75 each which is almost double the deal Sleyk got us but still a decent deal for 12gb SAS self encrypting drives and at least they are 0 hours. I'm running 60TB raw with 2 hot spares in each of these servers, which for me breaks down to $425 Server+$240 RAM+$900 HDDs + $40 SSDs = $1,605 total andI think that is pretty slick for 1U.

When I did try running these with the SATA drives I never had an issue when they were detected I just had to either reset the SATA port or reboot the whole server if they were not detected on boot. I'm not sure what other use case you guys might want these servers for besides some type of NAS but they are workable with SATA drives though I'm sure once one of us figures out the back plane update these will be more appealing. I'm glad @frsp_1 posted these as I'm on the hunt for some other cool quanta servers now to add to the rack.
 
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YuanyangX

Member
May 17, 2019
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WA, USA
Spent a few hours trying to get this working with storcli, keeps giving me an error, see attached. The enc ID is 12 and 252, tried both, no go.

Anyone else have any luck yet?
I finally got sometime to play with it. After running storcli.efi /c0 /eXX download src=S1Q_LSI_FW_v1.0.8.fw, I got a success reported.
I think the tricky part would be:
1. Run upgrade without any disk connected.
2. Run upgrade in EFI shell instead of any OS. I think it will limit device mounting or something.

I only put single 1TB SATA (ST1000DM003) to test the disk cage from cold start. And the disk shows up correctly. I'm considering to move the SAS3108 from the other server to this one to get better RAID performance.
Attached a screenshot to show the FW version numbers.

Wish your upgrade will be same smooth as mine.
 

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tjk

Active Member
Mar 3, 2013
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Looks like it took the new bios too after the expander upgrade?
 

tjk

Active Member
Mar 3, 2013
481
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43
I finally got sometime to play with it. After running storcli.efi /c0 /eXX download src=S1Q_LSI_FW_v1.0.8.fw, I got a success reported.
I think the tricky part would be:
1. Run upgrade without any disk connected.
2. Run upgrade in EFI shell instead of any OS. I think it will limit device mounting or something.

I only put single 1TB SATA (ST1000DM003) to test the disk cage from cold start. And the disk shows up correctly. I'm considering to move the SAS3108 from the other server to this one to get better RAID performance.
Attached a screenshot to show the FW version numbers.

Wish your upgrade will be same smooth as mine.
What process did you use to boot an efi shell?
 

sparx

Active Member
Jul 16, 2015
320
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Sweden
efi shell
Now im not sure, but many server products have the efi shell built in to the bios so its available as a boot option. Either F12 (or other button) to have quick boot menu and boot directly to EFI shell. Again, Im not sure this product has this built in.
 

tjk

Active Member
Mar 3, 2013
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Now im not sure, but many server products have the efi shell built in to the bios so its available as a boot option. Either F12 (or other button) to have quick boot menu and boot directly to EFI shell. Again, Im not sure this product has this built in.
yea, I select the UEFI boot shell, it says booting and then dumps me back into the bios settings.
 

sparx

Active Member
Jul 16, 2015
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Sweden
then dumps me back
Sometimes it's necessary to press some button or escape to get it to stay inside the shell. But it could also be that it is searching for the EFI on a USB stick or something to boot from there. Are you trying on this exact product? Maybe someone that has it can verify.
 

YuanyangX

Member
May 17, 2019
50
34
18
WA, USA
It had a FAT32 USB drive attached when booting into EFI shell. For safety and avoid confusing, I didn’t insert any hard drive also. There was a 5 seconds counting down before entering shell but no key press was needed.