SuperMicro 1U Rack Server 6014H-32 needs extra card for RAID 10
Posted on Sep 18, 2009 by
Paul WhiteFor 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-42The 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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