Tag: supermicro

Supermicro 815 1U case 2,5″ HDD and RAID card battery holder (#P40)

New year, new hardware. Given space (in general, as well as in this specific case) is limited, old hardware has to go. So it’s about time post this 3D printed thingy, since the related hardware is about to be sold.

Now, the Supermicro 815 case, CSE815, SC815 or whatever prefix is en vogue nowadays, is one of those 1U pizza boxes. Shout-out to Supermicro for using webp images on their website already – but sticking to 261 x 222 px resolution for the full-size file.

Anyway, these come in two dozen varieties plus the EOL ones, and all of them have four 3.5″ HDD hotplug caddies in the front and some 1 to 3 card slots in the back, since it is a tiny case at 1U or 44mm height regardless of the 19″ width. […]


Random thoughts on Supermicro Risers, LSI LBAs, power supplies, ZFS and other fun server things (#P34)

With the failed 450W SFX power supply separated into a regular post last week, now’s the time to waffle on about what happened besides that.

Well, Solaris 11.4 (evil developer/home use licensing, so no current service packs) still uses minimal ashift as default instead of a fixed value of 12. ashift is the exponent of the power of 2 that is used as smallest assignable portion of data, so basically sector size. “Old” default is 9, as 2^9 is the well known 512 byte sector size that most old hard disks had as both logical and physical size, and which they reported as such. […]


Supermicro X9SRW-F Ivy Bridge EP compatibility comparison (#P33)

Some canned content for today – back when making the Supermicro 2011 board fit my needs (#P23,#P24), I stumbled upon the Ivy Bridge thing. Technically, the two rack servers that I got should both be compatible with the E5-2600 series (Sandy Bridge EP), as well as E5-2600v2 series (Ivy Bridge EP). The product website states that “BIOS version 3.0 or above is required” for this to work, and both boards run the most recent version (not that there’s so many versions to choose from). Both had a E5-2630L installed, so SB-EP. […]


Supermicro X9SRW-F small riser mounting adapter (#P24)

More fun with the Supermicro X9SRW (and we’re still not done yet!)

The two X9SRW machines that I got had the same CPU and RAM situation, but one of them was in a 815 (1U) case, and the other one still is in a 825 (2U) one. I scrapped the noisy 815 for my board and allocated the more spacious 825. Fans are not the only thing that differs, though, as the added height also caused Supermicro to exchange the riser card for a different one. While the top riser is just an angled PCIe x8 connector (high up to make room for some heat sinks underneath), the bottom one is a WIO type that distributes 32 lanes in total. […]


Fitting a proprietary Supermicro X9SRW-F into a standard 3U 836 case (#P23)

Blogging’s a bit tedious right now, as shipping parts is rather slow at the moment, and there’s so much going on at work…

This has been in the making for the past two months now. Some very nice dude gave away “old” servers at a popular German hardware forum, but requested local pickup due to the difficult and expensive shipping of entire server chassis. These were decommissioned colocation servers from his own business, aged 7 to 12 years and no longer viable for 24/7 operation – still decent machines for occasional use. […]


CR2025/CR2032 battery dummy for power consumption tests and a hungry Supermicro board (#P21)

This bugged me for quite some time now: Ever since a very nice dumpster revealed a stripped Supermicro server chassis including a Supermicro X8DTL board (Dual-1366) to me, the BIOS battery of that system seemed to be empty all the time. You see, I use this machine as an offline backup, so once every couple of months I fire it up, transfer my data, and unplug it from power and ethernet. And almost always it doesn’t start right up because the CMOS data is gone. Ideally it should be a headless unit, so that’s highly inconvenient.

I finally got around to test this – the fix will be another project for some day in the future. […]


Supermicro Case and Rails (#P6)

Supermicro – the case manufacturer of choice for people with money. :lol:

This is not so much about Wan Hung Lo price ranged products, but rather about construction techniques. And it’s not even about “we made it this way because it’s the cheapest” – it’s about design that yields the most profit for the manufacturer. Vendor lock-in and all that stuff.

Well, I’m more of a Chenbro guy for reasons that I’ll explain in a bit, but I recently did a classic Dave Jones dumpster dive (with permission), from which I got not one, but four Supermicro cases. […]