Are You Looking For A Less Expensive Norco 4220 / 4224 Alternative? - Page 40

anyone get an email yet for the new batch?

Yes. Iv'e been on the waiting list for quite a few months though. My box should be shipping soon. I'm glad I waited instead or getting a Norco sooner.

do you sill have anymore for sale?

Has anyone with the Supermicro H8DM8-2 successfully updated their video card?

The onboard ATI ES1000 does not have any updated drivers for Windows 7 or 8, so the server will not hibernate or sleep properly. I purchased an x16 video card (Radeon 5450) and x8 adapter off eBay but could not get it to recognize the card.

Any help is appreciated.
Edited by Biggrich76 - 2/13/13 at 4:53pm

I asked Supermicro about the ES1000 GPU and they told me that no new drivers exist since its legacy and the worst part is that most if not all the motherboards that have it will not accept any GPU cards on either the PCI-e or PCI slots.

Well, that's a bummer. Although, this guy here was able to get a X1600 card working in his H8DME-2 (which also has the ES1000 onboard) with an x8 - x16 adapter.

Maybe because it's a PCI-E 1.0 card?

So you were e-mailed today? When did you get on the waiting list? I called Monday and told them they didn't even have to verify that I wanted one. I said I'd take it. She told me that she'd note that, but that they had to verify that they were working before many of the e-mails would go out. I submitted my name weeks ago, when they told me there were about 30-40 names on the list. They should have more than that coming in.

I emailed them last Sept and Nov. I never got a reply that i was added to the list but then just yesterday i received an email saying they had some available. They are only sending out sections of the waiting list at a time, oldest first. Be patient, I'm sure your time will come. I never expected to hear from them and was pleasantly surprised.

Well that stinks but I guess it makes sense. They are interested in performance and not so much on electricty usuage.

Well, yeah, when you get into boxes with this kind of capacity it's sort of assumed you're not going to be getting into a lot of power savings features. You can certainly swap out the motherboard for something that does a better job.

The value of the deal here has been getting a high quality chassis at a great price. For many people it's been a great jumping off point for other upgrades. The hard part when you're dealing with wanting to use a lot of drives is the chassis, not the motherboard, memory or other stuff. These are great for that. Me, I wanted to build a box that was good for running a number of virtual machines, one of which being a big file server. So I swapped out the motherboard for something that handles the VMWare stuff better and some other SATA interface cards for the drives. It was STILL a good deal because of the quality of the chassis and the drive sled setups.

Meanwhile in one of my other chassis I swapped in Supermicro Atom board and am delighted at the much lower power consumption it requires. The board's not all that capable when it comes to serious drive I/O performance but it's great for use as a standalone mail and DNS server. Some stuff like that is better off on it's own, vs being tied up inside a VM server with a lot of other stuff running.

Well, they did say most. I am sure some of them will work. The ones I have do not.

I think that only works on Windows 7. I recently upgraded to Windows 8 on the cheap (before they jacked up the prices) so I could take advantage of Storage Pools.

DON'T DO IT!!

Storage spaces/pools in Win8/Server2012 have significant problems, with little chance of recovery if anything goes slightly awry. The technology is not mature enough to trust your data to at this point.

Yeah, I am slowly figuring that out. Luckily I'm only using it in a JBOD configuration with no parity. The storage pool is just for my media at this point, large files that rarely change and can easily be replaced if something goes wrong.

I'm going to be upgrading to FlexRaid in due time, I just have to buy a couple more drives to copy over some data first.

Same here. No problem with Storage Spaces since I'm just using it for pooling only.

I'm happy to report that the x1 version of the HD5450 works fine in the H8DM8-2. There may be cheaper x1 video cards that will work but this was the one I settled on.
http://www.amazon.com/HIS-Silence-DisplayPort-PCI-Express-H545H1GD1/dp/B004GL72K0/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1360984663&sr=8-1&keywords=5450+x1

Although they do run about 3 times the cost of an x16 card, it works with Windows 8 and the latest AMD Catalyst drivers. Sleep and Hibernate now function properly.

The fans stay active but the hard drives spin down and the rest of the server enters sleep mode.

I've tried setting ACPI to v3 in the BIOS but that didn't help. I wonder if the motherboard drivers need to be updated to allow the fan headers to turn off power?

Under Advanced BIOS Settings, there are ACPI settings but only 1-3.

From the manual
Changing from 1 to 3 didn't seem to make any difference on my system, the fans still stay active. And I agree, with the fans still spinning there isn't enough power savings to even bother.

can they be shipped to canada if theres ever more available?

Any word on how many (if any) are left?

ok thanks...my father lives in states so i can get shipped to him....

Has any one tried a 4TB drive in one of these? I have a 2U, a 4TB drive would make a great parity drive for my setup.

The SATA cards themselves will not identify anything larger than 2.2TB during boot, but I was able to get Windows to see my 3TB drives by partitioning them as GPT (instead of MBR).

I'm not sure about 4TB drives but I would assume the same scenario would apply.