SUPERMICRO SYS-5026T-3FB 2U Barebone Server Intel X58 LGA 1366 Intel Core i7 / i7 Extreme Edition, and Intel Xeon 5600/5500/3600/3500 series

Pros: Great server.

Cons: SuperMicro says the heat sinks are shipped separate from the servers. NewEgg says they only sell what's in the server box. In other words, despite that SuperMicro's web site says that a heat sink is included, if you order this server from NewEgg, you will not receive it and must purchase it separately.

Pros: Good basic server, well built and a quite a few extras (removable fans, etc.,)

Cons: Racking is a huge pain due to cheap, ill built rails. No support for drives > 3TB on the LSI or Intel controllers. No front USB ports. Installing *anything* into the front internal bays requires a longer SATA cable or a bit of luck with fishing it under the front left fan. Documentation could be more complete.

Pros: Nice and quiet. Cheap. Plenty of space to move around.

Cons: Careful! EVen though you ordered it with the SAS controller, they DO NOT ship with SAS cables. Make sure you order some now. They also plug in the backplane to the SATA controller.

ORDER SAS CABLES NOW! Hope that saves you some pain later.

Pros: Price and usually good bang for the buck with Supermicro

Cons: Needs at least a 2 ft or longer sata cable for any cd/dvd rom.
Cable should have been included.

Other Thoughts: I am a good tech and my inventory of cables and adapters is pretty well stocked, but how many of us have a stock of 24 to 30 inch Sata cables.
The manufacturer is aware the lenght of Sata cable required is not standard and therefore should have included one.

Pros: None that matter when you look at the Cons.

Cons: Recieved Server, Nothing worked, no beeps, no nothing - except power fans running. After horrible tech support asking the stupidiest questions ever, clearly showing their skills in their craft, The board was returned to them in a cross ship format, which means these losers charge you for a second piece of hardware and then tell you they will refund you when they recieve the bad piece, the second mainboard came in 4 days later and this one booted up, except this board could not read over 16 gigs and would cause windows 2003/8 setups to blue screen upon installation, as well as the onboard intel or adaptec raid controller not reading my hard drives correctly AT ALL (5X1 TB WD's in RAID5) After calls and calls and emails and emails they sent me over a BETA of the latest bios, which corrected the 16 gig memory problem, after that another 2 weeks of horrid tech support to get the Raid 5 to work, when finally someone tells me the Raid 5 on this trash motherboard only supports up to 2TB's!

Other Thoughts: They then claimed that the mainboard they recieved was damaged and would not return my money, so they stole it instead!!!!! Beware and take pictures of your items when you get them from these thieves at Supermicro , even though I'm sure they could care less and still wont refund anything for the garbage they send that just plain does not work!!!!!


Will never ever buy anything from this Joke of a company ever again.

Pros: Runs cool, doesn't make a lot of noise, easy to setup.

Cons: Power button can get stuck in the on position, which will cause the machine to power off after 5 seconds. It didn't take long to figure out, but strait out of the box it was a bit scary. Not really a big deal.

Other Thoughts: I was looking for a machine to run ESXi, and this is running very smoothly. I have multiple VM's running in ESXi v4.0 U1, here is my setup:
- SYS-5026T-3FB Barebones Item #: N82E16816101234
- 12 GB RAM Item #: N82E16820231275
- Intel Core i7 Item #: N82E16819115214
- 4 x 1TB Seagate Item #: N82E16822148433
- 2 x 500GB Seagate (older drives for temp storage)
- Sony DVD Item #: N82E16827118034
- Areca 1210 RAID Controller Item #: N82E16816131003
Setup was easy. As with any system, I recommend spending time forcing failures to understand how things work before throwing it into production. The on-board RAID does not work with ESXi, you need the hardware controller if you want RAID. I had a minor question for Supermicro tech support and they responded via email very quickly.
I am now running this setup in production and it appears to be running very smoothly, I am very happy with this product.

Pros: This is a very nice 2U rackmount server with great performance / price ratio. Equipped with even the most inexpensive LGA1366 processor, it flies. 6x Hot-Swap, fits a standard 5.25" optical drive.

Cons: No floppy drive included (barely a con), and to install one, you need a super super long floppy cable (36" or so). Also, no front USB, so a front mounted (3.5") USB hub + long internal cable might be a good buy with this server.

Other Thoughts: Server comes shipped with hot-swap bays hooked to Intel SATA controller. I always switch the cables to the LSI SAS controller on the motherboard (don't forget to switch the hot swap management cables too!) giving me better performance and opening up the SATA controller for the optical drive.

Pros: High quality SuperMicro product. Everything is laid out nicely inside the chassis with easy access to the memory and CPU socket. Disk drive installation is easy with the standard drive trays accessible from the front. The package contains everything you need to rack mount the server.

Cons: The motherboard has no IDE controller. This means that you have to give up one (of six) SATA drives to install a SATA DVD/CD ROM in order to load the OS.

Pros: Well laid out machine. Easily the quietest 2u I've ever seen. Good PSU and motherboard for the money. Everything worked right out of the box.

Cons: Backplane removal was a bit of a pain as we had some special needs.

Pros: Works great. Everything fits well with plenty of room. Quiet and a really solid product.

Cons: NON