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SuperMicro 1U Rack Server 6014H-32 needs extra card for RAID 10

Posted on Sep 18, 2009 by Paul White

For anyone who thinks its a great idea to buy a 1U rack server and colocate their own box.  I have a few thoughts about SuperMicro and how they setup their 6014H-32 superserver.  Basically if you want RAID 10 you have to buy an extra card.  else you are stuck with RAID 0, or RAID 1.  Which are great, but when you have 4 SAS drives naturally you want to use RAID 10 for both speed and redundancy.

I recently bought this server off ebay.  I was thrilled will the deal I got
Dual 3.6 Xeons
4GB RAM
4 x 73 GB SAS 10K RPM Drives
Built in SAS RAID controller
Floppy and CD-ROM
Includes power cord and RAILs
All for about $425

Here is a link to the SuperMicro SuperServer 6014H-42

The only down falls that I could initially see in my purchase was even though the Power Supply is modular, the box does not support Dual Power Supplies.  So if the power supply goes out, I will have to order one and run down to the datacenter to swap them out.  Another negative was the CD-ROM drive was not going to be any use because operating systems these days only fit on a DVD.  It might be possible to do it by Bootable thumb drive, but I wanted to keep things simple.  Fortunately I got a used Slim DVD ROM drive that would fit the server for about $20 off ebay.  I was concerned it wouldn't work, as there was no mention of it on Supermicro's website. Another Negative was the SAS drives were only 10K instead of the more modern 15K ones.  The SAS drives were also 3 years old ( manufactured in 2006 ).  Even though the seller on ebay said this box was sitting on a shelf for the past year, it doesn't mean these drives were never used.  Most manufacturers cover drives for up to 5 years.  This is assuming the drives would by under heavy use for 5 years.  I figure they would be good for at least another 2 or 3 years, until I would have to start swapping them out.  Unfortunately due to industrial demand I don't see the price of SAS drives going down anytime soon.  The 2 146 GB SAS drives I have running on my workstation cost the same now as they did a year ago when I build the system.

Other Server Options


I thought about Buying a Dell PowerEdge Server, but I really wanted a box that could manage 4 Drives all in a 1U platform.  Plus Dell's servers seemed to go for a premium. 

Potential Upgrades to this server


One thing I did consider was upgrading the SAS drives from the 73GB ones that came with it to 146GB ones.  This would give me 292 GB for storage, ( setup in RAID 10 )which should last me for quite some time.  But considering new SAS drives run about $200 each, this would be an expensive upgrade.

Getting it out of the Box


Once the server arrived, I powered it on and the first thing I was going to do was setup the 4 SAS drives in RAID 10.  This would enable stripping accross 2 of the drives while the other 2 would mirror the data.  This means I could loose 1 drive without a problem,  and I could loose 2 drives as long as they were both on the same Group.  But once I got into the RAID management system, I found that the only options I had were RAID 0 and RAID 1.  After visiting the website again I found that if you want more Advanced RAID setups like RAID 5, 10, or 50.  I would have to install a Supermicro All-In-One-ZCR Card: AOC-SOZCR1  Not a big deal, now to find that card.  What I didn't expect was that little RAID card costs $300.  Come on I only spent $425 on the server.  Of course since I am sure this is the only card that will enable RAID 10 support on this server, they have a monopoly on the market. After some more intense searching I found some for $288.  I still trying to find one for less, as I don't want to drop this kind of money on a RAID card.  Eventually I am sure I will have to bite the bullet and just buy the card retail ( as much as I hate to pay retail for anything ).  If I want RAID 10 its the only option I have.  Either that or I can just RUN the box in RAID 0, and then enjoy a week or stressful phone calls when my first drive goes out. 

Temporary fix


For now I setup the 4 SAS drives in RAID 0.  Just want to make sure Windows Web Server 2008 R2 will work correctly on this hardware.  SuperMicro has very limited support in the way of drivers for anything newer than Windows Server 2003. Considering I am just using this for a Web / Mail / MySQL server, the Web edition should get the job done.  Aiming to have this server colocated by Nov 1st.


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