Product Reviews

The system is supplied as a complete Supermicro 7045B-TR+ package, and its components add up to one smart server with a lot of expansion potential.

The front panel has a large drive cage with room for up to eight hot-swap hard disks, and there's a tasty quartet of Western Digital's latest 500GB RE2 (RAID Edition 2) hard disks. Physical security is good, since the front panel can be key-locked to prevent access to the hard disks, the side panel can be padlocked and the chassis has an intrusion-detection sensor. Power redundancy is also on the cards, as the server came with a pair of 800W hot-swap supplies.

Internally, everything is neat and tidy, with all cables tied up and secured out

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of harm's way. The Xeon 5160 processors are mounted with large passive heatsinks and cooling is handled well. A sculpted, transparent shroud is used to direct air over both modules, across the memory and out the rear. The chassis has a vertical bank of three hot-swappable fans at the front, while the shroud has two more at the rear. It all looks very effective, but removing the shroud is made more difficult since the power cables are routed over the top of it. Noise levels are also on the high side for small office use.

Amazingly, you can use the full potential of the 5000P chipset, as the motherboard sports 16 DIMM sockets, so you can go up to 64GB of buffered memory. Storage fault tolerance and hot-swap capabilities are handled by the embedded SATA controller, which adds support for RAID5 to the usual mirroring and striping options. Note this has only six ports, so if you want to use all the drive bays you'll need to fit an appropriate controller. No worries about expansion, though, as the motherboard offers plenty of PCI-X and PCI Express slots.

Tool-free maintenance is the order of the day, and even the front bay can be unclipped and slid straight out the front. If you want the rack server version of this chassis, you can rotate this assembly before refitting it.