Pros: 1U height and slim depth makes this fit perfectly in any SRW Tripplite cabinet

Cons: Air duct was confusing on how they wanted it installed to get the best air flow over the CPU. No pictures, or instruction on how it was supposed to be installed

Other Thoughts: Using this chassis to run the Lutron lighting server software and everything runs great. Paired this chassis with a Xeon E3-1226 v3 CPU, 8GB of RAM and a WD black drive.

Pros: Excellent barebones system for an E3-12xx based ESXi server. Relatively quiet with sufficient cooling capacity for small businesses that have no server room – even with 2 3TB WD Reds. IPMI is a wonderful addition with this SuperMicro board.

Cons: Some cable rearrangement is required to fit two drives – nothing that a pair of clippers and extra zip-strips can’t take care of.

Pros: Bought it as a Newegg combo with 1xE3-1230V3, 1xWD Black 1TB, 1x16GB (2x8GB) Crucial DDR3L ECC. I bought another WD Black hopefully to setup a mirror to have redundancy. I also bought another 16GB kit because I will be running ZFS. Cooling is great. In the cabinet with 25C/60%, CPU is idling around 26C with the air shroud. Burning prime95 is aroung 75C, and both hard drives are around 35C when doing intensive task, I would say acceptable.

Cons: Only problem with mounting two 3.5" hard drives is that the mounting on the right is crowded with the cables from PSU and the front panel. You will need to cut the zip ties on the PSU cables and re-routed most of the cables in order to fit the the second hard drive.

Other Thoughts: Although the 1U body is light enough to be front-mounted only, I would recommend getting the a shelf and remove the front mount.

Pros: Very small, almost too small, but it works. I thought the fans in the center would leave the hard drives without enough cooling, but I was pleasantly surprised that they do a great job of keeping 2 western digital raptors and a 3.4GHz core i3 CPU quite cool without running even close to full speed (12,000 RPM). normally the fans run at 4000 RPM in a 78 degree room, can't even hear it behind a closed door. IPMI is a MUST HAVE the ability to have a remote KVM into the bios with the ability to mount a CD-rom iso over the network is amazing. Fits 2 3.5" western digital 1TB hard drives and an SSD if you get creative.

Cons: no mounting holes on the left side under and in front of the pci slot for an ssd, there's some dead space that can easily be used. I got my trusty drill out an modified the case so I can fit 2 3.5" drives and a 2.5" SSD.

Other Thoughts: Plan on providing your redundancy with a software solution, I use Ceph with Proxmox, for a full-featured and fault-tolerant Virtual environment. For a proper cluster you need at least 3 servers, similar in cost to a single server with redundant everything. I prefer cluster computing because now I even have protection against a memory, CPU or motherboard failure.

It would be a good idea to get these mounting rails (Supermicro MCP-290-00004-03) otherwise this server will sag in the back.