I just got two of these. Fully loaded. Disks, sleds, rails.
Fiber cards + 4 onboard NICs and 4 more on another card.
Its a dual proc board with a bunch of ram slots. (I think its Sandybridge procs, DDR3.)
20 HDD bays. These things are (older) beastly storage boxen.
Board Manufacturer: Supermicro
Chassis Part Number: CSE-846BTS-R920BP
Board Part Num: X9DRi-LN4+/X9DR3-LN4+
Product PartNum: SSG-6047R-E1R24N
I got them because they were at a remote colo, and they crashed a bunch of times.
They cost us more downtime than they were worth.
I happened to be in town and made my boss an offer.
He didn’t have to pay for e-waste fees, and I removed his problem for the low, low cost of $0.
So now they are my problem.
I don’t need 200 TB of redundant storage. I’m gonna shop em out and sell em.
No idea if the dual 920 watt psu will blow my apt breakers. Takes a lot of juice to spin 20 hdds.
So far, I’ve hauled them across half the US, up my stairs, and admired them.
I found a youtuber ‘Art of the Server’ with some helpful vids. Watched a bunch.
No real idea what I’m doing next.
I’ve configured them several times in the past. They always died after months of steady service.
Dead disks, etc. Maybe bad controllers?
A fault that intermittent is hard to diagnose, but they are in front of me now.
I can do whatever I need to. These are complicated devices.
My original plan of teardown and rebuild seems unwise now.
I’m interested in any practical feedback.
1000 watts is ~10amp at 120v (I know what it actually is, I’m using round figures to make it easy to grok). Plus isn’t this a 220V device?
If it’s 120V, it’s likelyntonhave a different plug design, I forget the number.
That said, it’s gonna pull hundreds of watts at idle.
I’d sell much of it and use that to buy what I really want. I’d consider keeping drives if they’re a useful size for you.
It’ll probably only draw a couple hundred watts, even if substantially full. The real thing to tackle here is heat. It will definitely warm up your room.
Source: I have a 26 drive array and it only draws around 350 W with all drives spinning during parity check. Usually they aren’t all spinning though, and it goes down to around 220 W idle. That’s with an Epyc 7702 and a 25GB nic as well.
Ok cool. Ya we closed our office, and I work from home now, so my only bench is my livingroom table. It’s gonna be an interesting moment when I power the first one up, but I’m glad to hear they will probably run.
Yeah, unless you have really jacked-up wiring (like, really bad), then the worst that would happen is tripping the breaker. But I don’t think you’ll pull enough amps to do that with this setup alone. Is there anything else using a lot of power on this breaker?
Nah, I live alone. Just me, two cats, and my robots. I can turn everything off if I want.
I pulled the rails off today, packed those up. You know, so I don’t slice my leg open walking by them.
I’ll plug one in this week and get started with it.
We run 120v in our colos. Standard plugs. I haven’t plugged it in yet, but I don’t think the cable or voltage will be an issue.
The drives … well I’ve got at least 50 drives here. (There were a few spares too.)
They are all WD Reds 4tb and above. Great for this application, but my homelab servers both have several TB of unused redundant storage, including SSD on each.
So I don’t need em, but that many drives … hell, if I sold just the drives as refurb on ebay, I think I could make like $2k.
I do anticipate selling the two devices with the drives as a complete kit.
I hope I can sell them locally (Portland OR). These beasts would be a b!tch to ship.