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One of the most popular motherboard reviews on STH of the Xeon 3400 series generation was the Supermicro X8SIL-F. It was a micro ATX (mATX) motherboard with some of the mainstay server board features such as dual Intel 82574L Gigabit NICs and IPMI 2.0. Looking forward to this generation, Supermicro has a spiritual successor in the X9SCM-F which has been a popular board. Tyan has responded to the X9SCM-F with a similar board, the S5510 series S5510GM3NR, that has one key advantage, three Intel 82574L NICs. Read the full story

One of the most popular mATX server motherboards reviewed on this site was the Supermicro X8SIL-F. It provided a small form-factor, relatively inexpensive platform with features one would want from a low-cost server motherboard. With the new Sandy Bridge Xeon’s Supermicro has an updated platform, the Supermicro X9SCM-F, that takes advantage of the new PCIe lanes from the Intel C204 chipset to provide an interesting alternative to the previous generation X8SIL-F. Read the full story

The ASUS P8H67-M EVO is a very interesting board with a lot of features for the HTPC enthusiast. Based on the H67 chipset, the mATX board utilizes Intel’s Sandy Bridge on-die GPU to provide video connectivity. With the P67 chip set supporting overclocking, split PCIe lines off of the GPU, but lacking the ability to utilize Intel’s on-die GPU, the H67 chip set found on the ASUS P8H67-M EVO positions the board for the HTPC market or others where 3D graphics performance is not required beyond Windows 7′s Aero interface. This particular board intrigued me because it has not just a PCIe x16 slot, but also includes a PCIe x4 slot (with AMD CrossFire support), a PCIe x1 slot, and a legacy PCI slot in the compact mATX form factor. Read the full story

While visiting a local retailer I saw a Supermicro SC-731i-300B on the shelf during the same visit that I was purchasing the Core i7-2600K and ASUS P8H67-M EVO that were used in the Sandy Bridge and H67 chip set for the home server review. It is one of those items that came close to making the cut for the Entry DIY Storage Server Buyer’s Guide, December 2010 but fell just short. Of course, I promptly placed the box in my cart deciding it would make a reasonable home for the H67 Sandy Bridge system. Read the full story

After completing the first DAS/ SAS Expander JBOD enclosure project I realized that there was a major area of improvement. Using less than 30% of a large 4U case’s volume for useful purposes seemed like the key area to improve upon. As I was completing that build I soon realized that I wanted a secondary server to be able to access some of the drives for EXSi or Hyper-V virtual machines. Further, NAS operating systems that run poorly in virtual machines, such as unRaid require dedicated server for testing. I could have built another server in another enclosure, but I decided that I could improve upon the original design and access drives that are housed in the Big WHS ecosystem through a simple cable swap. This eliminates the need to physically move drives from enclosure to enclosure. The following is a slightly (approximately $20) more expensive version of the original Build Your Own JBOD DAS Enclosure with a HP SAS Expander iteration.

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As I mentioned in the previous post on the compatibility issue, I had to RMA my Supermicro X8SIL-F (mATX LGA 1156 server board with IPMI 2.0 and dual Intel gigabit NICs) last week because it was version 1.01 PCB instead of v1.02. The difference being support for Clarkdale CPU’s.

Just to give an idea of why Supermicro’s support is so good here is the timeline:

1. Sunday (day 0) - Sent a note to Supermicro tech support explaining my problem.
2. Monday morning (day 1) - Received a confirmation that I needed v1.02 PCB of the X8SIL-F to use with my Intel Core i3-530.
3. Monday afternoon – submitted my RMA request online
4. Tuesday mid-day (day 2) - was contacted by Supermicro RMA support, I gave the requried information for advanced RMA. Later that day I got a follow-up e-mail saying that the advance RMA request had to be approved and that it may take until the next day.
5. Wednesday (day 3) – confirmed that I accepted the Supermicro advance RMA policy, and that ground shipping would be fine (I live only a few miles from a Supermicro facility).
6. Thursday (day 4) – New X8SIL-F shipped.
7. Friday (day 5) – X8SIL-F was at my doorstep. I was not home to sign for the delivery, so made arrangements to pick up at the UPS facility. Bottom line is that Supermicro had the replacement board at my doorstep within 96 hours of submitting my RMA request.

Overall great service from Supermicro! I have also decided that I will house this in the Norco RPC-4220 that serves as the DAS box for the Big WHS. That way I can use it to add drives for the test environments. Odds are I will either run ESXi with a few Linux/ FreeBSD/ OpenSolaris virtual machines or just run OSes directly on the PC. I am also planning to power this system independently of the rest of the enclosure and drives so that I can power cycle the server without taking the drives off of the Areca array.