Server Upgrade Log 1 - Why Move?
April 8, 2026
The Story So Far
I’ve started accumulating various issues with our current main storage server: besides being a massive dual xeon beast from 2014, we’re massively limited by our 4 available 3.5” hot-swap drive bays. Given the current HDD situation due to AI-related supply droughts, we’re left to pick through some of the used SAS drive pulls on ebay for decently priced large capacity drives. We do have 8 2.5” bays, but I don’t want to pay double for SFF drives that aren’t even 1/4 as dense as our current 12TB drives.
We’re also SOL on the current power delivery, since Intel, in their infinite wisdom, didn’t deign to provide any pcie 6-pin power connections from the power delivery unit that comes with the chassis by default. I could try to find the upgrade somewhere online, but sifting through random seedy sites for a 12-year-old part just so I can drop a basic GPU in the machine isn’t my idea of fun.
Finally, the motherboard is old enough and low tier enough that it doesn’t come with 10GbE or NVMe M.2 support, which would be nice to free up some PCIe slots.
So our requirements:
| Need | Why | Current | Goal |
|---|---|---|---|
| More HDD capacity | Current Drives are 97% full | 4x3.5” 8x2.5” hot-swap bays | At least 8x3.5” |
| More power delivery | GPU compatibility | Literally none | At least enough for 2 3090s, if they ever come down in price ;-; |
| Power efficiency | Electricity isn’t cheap | 150w base, 300w max draw | Less, hopefully idle time can drop down to below 100w |
We’re currently working out of an Intel S2600CW2S in the slightly better than base Intel Server Chassis P4304. It’s a dual Ivy-Bridge Xeon motherboard, and currently has a set of E5-2698v3 with 512GB of RAM from a 16 x 32GB 2133MHz DDR4 LRDIMM ECC kit.
While the chassis came with two 8-bay 2.5” hot-swap drive cages, getting any decent storage needed a 3.5” cage. Luckily I found one nearly new for ~$90. Given the server (with 96GB of ram included mind you, ah the naivete…) was $140, and the matched pair of CPUs was $30, I figured we made out with a pretty powerful machine for only $260. I got the ram kit and a set of 4x 12TB drives (only after getting a 10TB SAS drive and finding out the 3.5” drive cage backplane has no SAS support) around July 2025, so all told, it was $260 + $550 + $265x2 (12TB Ironwolf drives) + $166x2 (12TB WD120EDBZs) = $1672.
At time of writing, a similar 512GB ram kit new retails for ~$3000… yikes.
But I digress… The main issue is that I don’t want to pay for another drive cage, especially when it isn’t going to let me use the slightly cheaper SAS drives floating around used server markets. Furthermore, the server’s architecture is old enough that power efficiency is a problem, besides the whole 2 CPUs thing. I’d like a more power efficient, hopefully just as fast, and much larger (storage wise) server to grow into. Bonus points if I don’t need to go to sleep to its sweet high-pitched fan whine from the closet or take out a mortgage to afford it.
Enter the Challenger
At $800 list price, a used Supermicro CSE-745 with a X11SPi-TF motherboard, no CPU, RAM, or HDDs might not seem like the best deal, especially given my requirements, BUT:
- Supermicro has so far been pretty good about keeping older stuff supported and functional, and most importantly for me cheap. I should be able to drop in another motherboard if this one is bad or another gets cheaper. EPYC Milan anyone?
- I just desperately need more storage. We’re currently 97% full on our current storage, RAID 10 means ~21.05 TiB used of 21.7TiB.
- I need this to run in a closet near my room, so anything with more storage will probably be a real rackmount system, so silent running is very, very important.
Some bonuses:
- Big enough to fit a full size GPU, so I might be able to fit a decent transcoding GPU or even a nice local AI GPU.
- Built in 10Gb networking, so I can drop a whole nic card too.
- Actual Nvme m.2 support, so I can run a good boot drive finally (even though most of the boot time is spent memory training).
- Scalable Xeons are like $50 for the first gen, and the refreshes are relatively cheap for server parts.
Cons: -Lose out on literally half my ram, but I’m sure someone will want it considering the whole situation right now. -I can’t use 4 SAS SSDs that I got a while ago as a possible ssd cache for the main storage, but $50/drive isn’t as bad of a loss compared to HDD prices.
Overall not that bad, and assuming no massive hidden costs, this should be a relatively smooth transition. We’ll see when it arrives…:)