Normally, I wouldn't buy used hardware, but aside from getting a good
deal on modern kit, these things were assembled by some outfit out of
Texas and then shipped directly to my co-lo where they ran until the
company went out of business; I know no one else has gotten their
grubby, unprotected fingers all over the things. (I'm still planning on rigging up some sort of public demonstration of how ESD damages hardware. I ordered an electrostatic fieldmeter, and am looking at 'zapper guns' or electrostatic simulators.)
now, the first problem is that these boxes have 3x 2GiB ram modules.
6GiB ram each. Nothing, really. So I talked to the folks I rent my office from, and
bought a whole bunch of
8GiB ram modules. kvr1066d3q8r7sk3/24G I ended up paying something
like $400 for every 24GiB pack of three; pre-earthquake pricing.
So this takes care of the first problem. The next problem is that the
drives are not hot swap, and we all know how I feel about hot swap drives.
The nice thing about SuperMicro is that they are all about the
interchangeable parts. The SC822T-400LP is nigh identical to the
SC822i-400RCB that I'm stuck with, save for the backplane and hot-swap
trays.
I ordered a shit-ton
of
CSE-SATA-822 backplanes, one for each sc822 I got.
so removing the 'fixed' disks is pretty easy, you remove one screw then slide it out real easy-like.
Next, I take out the fans and insert the backplane
after tightening the three screws that hold the backplane in I simply attach the SATA cables to the backplane in the prescribed order. (the only tricky bit is that the on board sata ports are enumerated starting at port 1, while the backplane starts at port 0)
after that, I'm ready to put the disks in the new drive caddies and slide them home at that point you are ready to insert the new ram put the fans back in, button it up, and leave it on memtest and then burn-in for a few days.
Shortly we will see if what they say about the 55xx being better than the amd G34 systems on a per-core basis is true or not.
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