I can't tell from the descriptions, are those 31/2" drive bays or 21/2?

I recently purchased two of these boxes with high hopes for a ESXI  home lab.  Does anyone have ESXI 5 working properly on these?  I had to install ESXI from a CD rom attached to an internal sata (it would not recognize my usb cd-rom) and now on rebooting ESXI gets stuck at hbr_filter loaded successfully Running usbarbitrator start.  if I switch to alt F12 view it is spamming SATA link down hard resetting link.  Help?!

Thank you,

Martin

How do you enable the NVraid? To begin with lets say you have 4 drives you connect a SFF 8448 cable to 4 x SATA to ports 0, 1,2,3  which on the mother board are 8,9,10,11.  I turned on nvidia NVraid enabled the sata ports. moved the dries all over the place I am connected in the left side SFF port if you are facing the drive bay. I cannot get the drives to sho up or spinup.

Just a heads up. I haven't updated this in awhile.

I purchased 2 sff8448 to 4x sata cables.  I however could not get a single drive to function using this.  I contacted the seller on ebay, and asked for help.  He told me that I REQUIRED the perc6i.  He sold it to me, and i tried it out, and it worked perfectly.

NVRaid is set in the bios.  You enable it, then you have to enable it for each Port on the Motherboard.

I am using ESXI 5.0, booting of a usb drive.  It functions well, however I am working on having some temperature reporting to function.  Dell Open Manage may be able to help me with that.

I have about $1000 Invested in this server so far, with Four 2TB Barracuda drives in it.  I am happy with it, although I've hardly gotten to use it much.  It's a great bang for the buck.

I have to figure out which type of counter sunk screws i need for the drives now.  It is dependant on the angle of the countersink.

If you use Seagate Barracudas make sure you update your drive's firmware. (it made my raid array die)

If there's any other questions let me know.

I've also noticed that the fans do spin up hard at boot, and they do drop down.  however, with the fans which come in it you'll be deaf if you're sitting next to it.

So... Fans do ramp up under load.  I said before they never did.

Sup Viper?  I read from one of your previous post that you swapped out the chassis fan with Coolermaster 80mm fans?  Any chance you can provide all the part numbers?  I'm looking to swap them out as well.  Thx.

I was hoping this server (Dell PowerEdge DCS FS12) fan noise to a much more silent cooing system.

Any ideas to help me out ?

Thanks,

Drop in pretty much any 120mm fans. If you're not running a lot of drives in it, silent ones (Yate Loons etc) will even be enough. Mount them so they draw air in from the front and blow out the back.

Sorry, I didn't see you mentioning the DCS model before. I wouldn't know much about that system as I have no exposure to it. Even still, you should be able to find a much quieter 80mm fan from Scythe or Yate Loon that'll do what you need plenty. You can most likely build your own water cooling loop too, though I don't know where you'd put the radiator(s), nor do I know what socket your motherboard has, so finding a waterblock might be difficult. Even with a waterloop for the CPU, you'll still need air moving through the chassis for other components.

Thank you for your response Selta. However, the existing fan is 9000 rpm, 105 cfm, 80x80x38 mm with 60dBA spec.

I only have two drives and not planning to add more for quiet a while.

Since I don't have space for putting 120mm fans, I was looking for 80mm ones ? Do you think there is a chance to get an equivalent Water Cooling System ? . Thanks Again.

Viper,

I don't mean to thread jack... but I'm having the temp issues with the 1u variant of these servers.  Do you know if there is anyway around it?  I can't even run 6 threads loaded without it shutting down in minutes, even with the fans full blast.  Once it hits around 50c on one of the CPUs, the machines just turns off.

That's odd, but sounds like it should be easy to fix. Pop open the case and clean it out - paying particular attention to the heatsinks on the CPUs. They're likely dusty/dirty, keeping their efficiency down. If that doesn't help, I'd pull off the heatsinks, cleaning them and the CPU off (taking current paste off) apply a new thermal compound and see if that helps.

Hello Selta,

I've done this  :-x

Everything is beautifully clean, and I replaced the thermal paste with IC7 Diamond.

Doing that made the time to shut-down longer, but the machines both still shut down at 50c.

Unfortunately there is no setting in the BIOS to check for a shutdown temp, nor is there a BIOS that I know of to load on these.

DId get this solved I have same issue