YouTube Video Review � Chenbro RM41824E2

Published by Richard Parry on 26th Jul 2013

We've just uploaded our latest YouTube video - a review of a Chenbro RM41824E2 server chassis based server solution for a customer of ours.

The chassis used was a Chenbro RM41824E2, which is a fantastic enterprise grade 4U chassis. It has 24x 3.5" hot-swap bays compatible with SATA and SAS hard drives. The backplane in this chassis is a full SAS Expander. This means you only need a single MiniSAS 4 port cable attached to use all 24 drives. By using an Expander you reduce the available bandwidth to drives, but significantly lower the initial cost to purchase the server as only a single 4 port SAS RAID controller is required. Although the backplane and required RAID controller must be SAS, the backplane is fully SATA II and SATA III (6Gbps) compatible. Installed in this server for example were 24x 3TB Seagate Constellation SATA III, 7200RPM drives. This gives 72TB of storage potential in a 4U chassis.

The motherboard used in the example was a Supermicro X9SCL-F running with a cost effective Intel Xeon E3-1220V2 CPU and 16GB RAM. This particular motherboard also support an i3 CPU. The RAID card used was an LSI 9260-4i4e SATA/SAS Controller. This RAID controller was chosen as it has both an internal and external SAS port. The customer wanted to expand this system using additional external SAS JBOD’s at a later date to increase capacity. We have quite a range of JBOD’s available on our site here. The customer opted for RAID 6 setup over all drives for maximum storage, performance and reliability.

Also fitted were 2x 320GB Western Digital 2.5" Scorpio Black drives. This Chenbro chassis comes as standard with 2 rear mounted 2.5” hot-swap bays. These are also SAS/SATA 6Gbps compatible. These drives were connected to the onboard RAID and are RAID 1 mirrored for the OS. Fitted in the chassis is a Zippy 960W dual redundant PSU, allowing a PSU to fail and be easily hot-swapped with a replacement without any system disruption.

All of the products seen in the video review are available on our site to purchase individually, however if you would like to talk with us about a custom server configuration please call us on 0800 652 1649 or email us on [email protected]