# Benchmarking of products for server



## vince66 (May 20, 2018)

Hello Guys !

Can you tell me if someone of you has installed the FreeBSD on this workstation ?

Benefits and problems ?

Thanks very much.

Bye !!


----------



## vince66 (May 23, 2018)

Hello again,

can you give me a banchmarking of the Supermicro Mobile Rack shown at this link: [ *CSE-M35TQB* ].

Do you have one ? Have you test the solidity of moving parts, presence of plastic or metal, suitability for frequent use.

Thanks very much.


----------



## Phishfry (May 23, 2018)

When in doubt use newegg reviews:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817121405
Over 100 comments to read.


----------



## Phishfry (May 23, 2018)

Looking at the manual for that chassis motherboard, it does appear to run NVMe in native x4 PCI 3.0 mode.
My only concern is: The CPU is really nice, but is a bit dated, like 2 years old now.


----------



## Phishfry (May 23, 2018)

The Newegg reviews for that SM Drive bays do look bad.
Take into consideration that some people are idiots.

Like I keep saying though, These bays are not made for daily insertions. Most people would be pulling drives once a week at most.

I was going to recommend a Icy Dock Drive Bay with metal and trayless, online reviews were glowing but Neweggs were horrible.
So I can't recommend with that in mind. I have an Icy Dock 2.5" X4 in a 5.25 bay and I like it.

I want to say this on drive backplanes. I have had many and none were without their problems.

Typically what I do is find the problem drive bay, use a small ball of modeling clay stuck to the back of the drive to figure out the depth to backplane on each drive and shim the backplane out from those readings. Ideally this would not be needed but if you want cheap drive bays to work perfectly you might need to work on them.


----------



## Phishfry (May 23, 2018)

Please consider the Chenbro Drive Bay. It is more costly but I think better quality.
Many of the Intel rackmount server components are Chenbro OEM. Tiawan makes good gear.


----------



## vince66 (May 24, 2018)

Phishfry said:


> The Newegg reviews for that SM Drive bays do look bad.
> Take into consideration that some people are idiots.


Hello Phishfry,

I've read the reviews of Newegg about the drives'es bays and I'm agree with you that some negative considerations are magnified.
This is why I thought to open the "Benchmarking of products for server" thread.
In this way, alongside the public reviews, it is possible to meet forum's people who really own a product and in an objective way can express a more realistic opinions and tips.

And from what you say, I believe that you are among those who can give a valid support thanks to your personal experience.

Thank you for the information you sent me. I will keep them in highest regard.


----------



## SirDice (May 30, 2018)

Phishfry said:


> I was going to recommend a Icy Dock Drive Bay with metal and trayless, online reviews were glowing but Neweggs were horrible.
> So I can't recommend with that in mind. I have an Icy Dock 2.5" X4 in a 5.25 bay and I like it.


I have several variations of these drive bays, for sets of 3.5" and 2.5" disks and I like them too. The only thing I would recommend to watch out for is the builtin fan. Some models use an "odd" sized fan that can't be easily replaced. The latest drive bays I bought I specifically made sure it had a common sized fan (80x80mm) that was also easy to replace without having to take the whole thing apart.


----------



## vince66 (May 30, 2018)

SirDice said:


> The latest drive bays I bought I specifically made sure it had a common sized fan (80x80mm) that was also easy to replace without having to take the whole thing apart.



Hello Sir,

please, can you write here the models of the latest drive bays you bought and the store where you bought them ?

Thanks very much for you help.


----------



## SirDice (May 31, 2018)

vince66 said:


> the store where you bought them


Only two stores where I buy most of my stuff from and both are in the Netherlands, I doubt they'll accept orders from outside the Benelux (Belgium, Netherlands and Luxembourg). But I do believe lots of minor and major stores sell them.

https://www.icydock.com/
Look for the 2.5" and 3.5" "cages"

Both stores, just for good measure: 
https://www.alternate.nl
https://www.informatique.nl/

Both have a store near Rotterdam, so I can order online and easily pick them up at their stores (saves me postage costs and I can pick it up when I want).


----------



## Phishfry (May 31, 2018)

While browsing all things Icy Dock I came across this device which is back to my dock idea. An internal dock.
2 bay model:
https://www.amazon.com/ICY-DOCK-Trayless-Hot-swap-Mobile/dp/B01LZJNR91
I don't know how well these work but I think a tray is overkill. I don't see a 3.5" drive model.
Note:* These devices only work with 2.5" Drives*. They are used in SSD's and Laptop Hard drives.

They also make a 4 bay model for 5.25" Drive bays.
https://www.amazon.com/ICY-DOCK-Trayless-Hot-swap-Mobile/dp/B071NP2M6L

You want the Icy Dock ToughArmor line of drive bays. They are the metal ones.


----------



## Phishfry (May 31, 2018)

On the topic of Icy Dock 3.5 Bays, I have come to the same conclusion as earlier.
The reviews are bad. There are two models with a very similar arrangment:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994152
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994153

Even the 5 bay model looks to use a similar door with the same complaints:
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994205

So their trayless 3.5" models look really suspect.
When that many people compain about a hinge you can be sure there is an issue.


----------



## Phishfry (May 31, 2018)

What do you know, They make a dock with both 2.5" and 3.5" slots. It has descent reviews too.
Looks like lots of plastic.
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817994143&reviews=all


----------



## tingo (May 31, 2018)

FWIW, I use a MB455SPF in a fileserver. It is not trayless, but it works well.
and for a small personal NAS with 2.5 inch drives I use a SI-5226SS. I think the fan on it has stopped working, but the NAS and everything else still works.


----------



## vince66 (Jun 28, 2018)

Hello !!

I'm assembing two cases:

- the first one contains the motherboard and one power supply  (no SATA hard disk, because I use a Supermicro motherboard with NVMe M2 hard disk directly mounted on the motherboard). The motherboard has several hot-plugging SATA  ports.
- the second one only contains several variations of drive bays, for sets of 3.5" and 2.5" SATA disks (in the attached picture you can see a preliminary model I'm debugging in my office), one power supply and several fans that guarantee a high aeration of the case.

The SATA hard disks in the second case will be connected to the motherboard SATA ports (both the cases are equipped with SATA plate to realize the SATA connections between the two units).

QUESTION.

How can I power up the second unit using the electrical terminals of the power button (see attached picture) ?
NOTE: the hard disks in the second unit will never be boot hard disks.

One answer could be: connect the electrical terminals of the power button to the black and green terminals of the motherboard connector.
But the problem is that the power button is not a switch.
Tips and other cautions are welcome.

Thanks very much in advance.


----------



## tingo (Jun 28, 2018)

Those who need it use a dual PSU adapter (example only, you will have figure out all the details yourself). As you can see, this is a very simple adapter, you can make it yourself.


----------



## vince66 (Jun 28, 2018)

tingo said:


> Those who need it use a dual PSU adapter (example only, you will have figure out all the details yourself). As you can see, this is a very simple adapter, you can make it yourself.



OK.
I've understood. Very good solution.

I've never heard about dual PSU adapter, but I see that it can be easly buy on Amazon.

Thanks very much *tingo* !


----------



## vince66 (Jun 30, 2018)

tingo said:


> dual PSU adapter



Hello gang !

What do you think about this dual PSU adapter ?

Has someone of you used it (or a similar one) ?

Does it works fine ?

What does the bios do? Does it recognize a single power supply that delivers a power equal to the sum of the powers of the two power supplies? 

Thanks in advance.


----------



## ralphbsz (Jun 30, 2018)

The problem isn't the BIOS, it is the second power supply in the second computer.  ATX power supplies don't have a simple on-off switch any more (like old AT power supplies), instead they get turned on by a signal from the motherboard, which comes through the 20-pin connector.  Unfortunately, in your case the motherboard connector is in use by the first power supply.  Fortunately, it is easily possible to override this: There is a dedicated wire on the 20-pin connector (the one you will use in the second computer), which simply needs to be connected to ground (any black wire) to turn the power supply on.  Look on the web, there are lots of instructions for how to connect a simple switch there.

To your question: a normal motherboard BIOS doesn't "recognize" power supplies at all.  It simply closes a circuit to turn the power supply off.  The "chicken and egg" question is: how does the BIOS do that, where does the BIOS get power to make that decision (it is a complicated decision, which may require a small CPU)?  Turns out normal ATX supplies have a very small power supply built in, which permanently delivers low power to the motherboard, enough run a small service processor which manages turning the main power supply on when needed.  But the BIOS or the motherboard typically doesn't know the wattage or the serial number or the model of the power supply, it just has 1 bit of control: off and on.

With expensive servers, this gets much more complicated.  Those typically have two power supplies built into the case, for redundancy (so one power supply can be removed and replaced with a spare, while the computer keeps running).  They typically also have hot-swappable fans.  The two power supplies are designed to any one of them can handle the whole load; in normal operation they are both lightly loaded, which is good because it keeps things could and they live for a long time (heat is the enemy of capacitors and moving parts).  The two power supplies are typically connected to separate power distribution grids; this allows electricians to turn power off to one side and work on repairs and upgrades, without disrupting server operations.

High-end servers typically also have connections to "expansion boxes" (such as disk enclosures, which is what you are really building here), but there are many other kinds of expansion boxes.  In the old days, there were dedicated cables that were run from the server to those extra devices, and that allows the server to communicate with the expansions, turn them on and off, monitor temperatures and fans, and so on.  Today that is typically done by connected everything to a completely separate management network: each device in the data center has an extra ethernet port, which is connected to a separate ethernet fabric, and this is used by centralized management infrastructures.  If implemented correctly, this can make for extremely reliable servers, because the management system manages to deliver power, cooling and networking to the servers at all times, using redundant infrastructure.

Note that these techniques are typically used for commercial computing, with high-availability servers and services.  You would typically see this kind of hardware in the data center of a bank.  The big internet companies (Facebook, Apple, Google, Amazon, Alibaba) run their machines very differently: instead of trying to make each "computer" (server and external enclosures) as reliable as possible, they simply replicate services world-wide, and accept that individual machines or groups of machines are inherently reliable.  There is a story of a whole giant data center in Europe going offline for several days (due to an animal getting into the power distribution system and exploding spectacularly), but customers never noticed, other than a sub-second delay as work was routed to other locations. 

For your purposes, just read on the web about how to put a switch on the second power supply, done.  Search for "ATX power supply switch external" or some combination of such words.


----------

