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Chapter 3: Maintenance and Component Installation
3.5 Chassis Components
Storage Drives
The system supports sixteen 2.5" storage drives. If RAID is configured, these drives can
be removed or replaced without powering down the system. Eight hybrid connectors on the
backplane support NVMe or SAS/SATA drives, and the rest are SAS or SATA.
The NVMe ports provide high-speed, low-latency connections directly from the CPU to NVMe
solid state drives (SSDs). This greatly increases SSD throughput and significantly reduces
storage device latency by simplifying driver and software requirements resulting from the
direct PCI-E interface between the CPU and the NVMe SSDs.
One or two OCuLink cables (CBL-SAST-1021) are required to support NVMe drives.
Depending on the number of NVMe drives, one or two PCI-E connectors are used, and
therefore not available for expansion cards.
Note:
Enterprise level hard disk drives are recommended for use in Supermicro servers. For
information on recommended HDDs, visit the Supermicro website at
com/products/nfo/files/storage/SBB-HDDCompList.pdf
SAS/SA
TA
SAS/SA
TA
SAS/SA
TA
SAS/SA
TA
SAS/SA
TA
SAS/SA
TA
SAS/SA
TA
SAS/SA
TA
SAS/SA
TA/NVMe
SAS/SA
TA/NVMe
SAS/SA
TA/NVMe
SAS/SA
TA/NVMe
SAS/SA
TA/NVMe
SAS/SA
TA/NVMe
SAS/SA
TA/NVMe
SAS/SA
TA/NVMe
Figure 3-8. Drive Bay Configuration
Drive Carriers
Each drive carrier has two LED indicators: an activity indicator and a status indicator. For RAID
configurations using a controller, the meaning of the status indicator is described in the table
below. For OS RAID or non-RAID configurations, some LED indications are not supported,
such as hot spare. For VROC configurations, refer to the VROC appendix in this manual.