Est. delivery Fri, May 17 - Tue, May 21Estimated delivery Fri, May 17 - Tue, May 21
Returns:
30 days returns. Seller pays for return shipping.
Condition:
Open boxOpen box
Minor wear of labeling may be visible. Zero defects. Great sale, Get it now before it’s gone! C9 - New Open Box. May have light scratches or other minor blemishes from normal wear. C8 - Unused. F6 - Like New (Appendix C- Test and Repair).
It's a pretty standard dual-processor Supermicro Xeon board, with the caveat that it uses ilm narrow for the CPU heat sink mount and my old Intel board used ilm square. I had to get creative with the AMD heat sink mounts or spend another $110 for Noctua NH-D9DX i4 3U heat sinks that'd fit the Intel ilm narrow LGA2011 sockets. If your old board is ilm square, beware, your CPU cooler heat sinks won't fit the mounts properly. Oh, and it has issues with some of the cheaper SATA 3.0 daughterboards. They just won't recognize so if you were thinking of adding extra SATA drive capabilities with that, well, that's Intel for you. I tried every slot and none worked. YMMV.
That said it runs great, it doesn't overheat, and it all 32 processors are humming like mad with the RAM all populated. It's a good little board and I'd definitely buy it again even with the negatives.Read full review
First off the shear amount of enterprise hardware. When building a system for 24/7 deployment you should consider the build quality of the hardware, and although a re-purposed server like this is used equipment, it was designed specifically for this use. I would ask anyone considering retail NAS solution, like Synology, Qnap or Asustor to research the reliability of those builds.
CPU horse-power, the 2620's are not speed demons at 2.2MHz., but for simple file management, media server duty or basic VM platform you have 12 core's and 24 threads which it more than enough processing power for that.
32 Gb. Of ECC registered memory, again more than enough for all those uses.
Storage, Even if you only populated all 24 bays with 4Tb. Drives you would effectively have 88Tb. Of storage with 2 disks of parody and you could easily exceed 200Tb. With larger drives. In addition to the up front storage you also have 2 x SATA 3.0 ports and 4 x SATA 2.0 ports. This connectivity is a must have for VM applications.
Redundant nics. Although most retail NAS solutions now included redundant network connections but not all budget motherboards do, this being a enterprise type motherboard features 2 pretty robust intel i350 1G network ports and a dedicated IPMI port for a management interface. The Intelligent Platform Management Interface is a really useful direct management tool that is in behind the OS and really deserves it's own video to highlight that feature.
Redundant modular power supplies. Not only are the PSU's a tooless design making them a snap to replace but you have 2.This is a unique feature of most enterprise servers that provides fail over protection meaning, if the primary PSU dies the other takes over without skipping a beat. I have yet to see a retail NAS solution that has this feature and should ranks as high value for a single feature on a server.
PCI heaven, This board has a garden of PCI slots. 3 x PCI-E 3.0 x16 and 3 x PCI-E 3.0 x8 slots providing lots of option for PCI connected devices.
That's the good, now lets talk about the limitations.
The most glaring limitation is the backplane bottleneck. The SAS2-846EL1 does utilize the SAS2 proticol which allows you to use drives larger than 2Tb. But band width limitations prevent full utilization of SSD's mounted in caddies. This is where those SATA3 connections on the board can be utilized to run VM's and act as a Server Cache on SSD's.
No native 10G nic. Although your data transfer speed is limited by the backplane you should be able to get 2G through-put off the array and 6G from cache transfers on the SATA3 connections, but it will require adding a nic and using up a PCI slot. For most 1G will be perfectly acceptable, but if you are a power user that requires fast transfer speed, you'll have to upgrade.
Single core speed. The E5-2620 CPU's are OK for simple VM application, but if you want to game or perform work station tasks, nothing less than 2.9MHz. will do. There loads of available CPU's for this motherboard but speed comes at a price and you will want to factor that expense when planning you builds. I will eventually upgrade my CPU's to get the most out of VM's with work station applications.
Sound....This server performing minimal storage operations is very quite, but the CPU's passive cooling system design requires high speed fans and when the system is pushed the sound is atrocious. For right now I am going to attempt to live with the stock cooling system, but when I upgrade the CPU's I will have to address a alternative cooling solution.
Monster form factor. Not everyone has or wants to make room for a case this size. For me it's a non issue, and there are tons of small form factor server cases alternatives, so please take that into consideration before purchasing a server like this.
Turn Key. Though this seller has flashed the raid card into IT mode for you, you must be prepared to load the server software and set it up. For a lot of folks this is simply more technical stuff than they're comfortable with. The retail solution NAS market's selling point is their ease of use software and intuitive user interface and very small form factor devices, and there is a substantial market for that product. The down side is reliability and performance limitations for any heavy use or mission critical deployment on light duty hardware.
Conclusion:
I find the SuperMicro 4U CSE-846 Server to be a major value and great starting point for any DIY server project. I also think eBay seller “The Server Store” is a legitimate resource to anyone looking for affordable enterprise equipment and encourage you to check out their store on eBay. Ok, so lets talk about what makes this server, in my opinion such a great value. Read full review
This thing is simply put amazing with dual 12 core CPUs and 256 GB of ram. Using it as my storage server couldn't be more happy. recently got a TPM module for it just to see how it would handle windows 11 in all of its glory plugged in a 3080 just for fun and it eats everything alive with a little push on the CPU base clocks. I'm very happy with the results.
Hardware arrived well packaged and in good order. One cover latch was stuck and needed help opening. 24 consumer drives overheat at standard fan settings. Must configure to max via IPMI interface to work with freenas. Sounds like shop vac but cool. I’m researching advice on freenas and serve the home forums. There are fan control scripts out there but x9 and x10 motherboards need different scripts. Hardware is rock solid but needs skills to use properly.
