Gigabyte S451-3R0 Storage Server Offers A Great Xeon Scalable Platform With Up To 38 Drives

Written by Michael Larabel in Computers on 4 June 2019 at 07:11 PM EDT. Page 1 of 3. 1 Comment.

Since the Intel Cascade Lake launch in early April, the platform we've been using for our Xeon Platinum 8280 Linux/BSD testing has been the Gigabyte S451-3R0 Storage Server. Now having tested this Gigabyte server on a number of different Linux distributions as well as the BSDs and in an assortment of software configurations, we're quite confident in its abilities for those needing an Intel Xeon Scalable server platform that can accommodate a great deal of drives.

Gigabyte kindly sent over the S451-3R0 as part of our Cascadelake launch testing and the first time we've tried a Gigabyte Xeon server motherboard after our good experience with Gigabyte's EPYC workstation board. The S451-3R0 supports dual Xeon Scalable 1st/2nd Gen processors, sixteen RDIMM/LRDIMM DDR4 memory modules (with compatibility for Intel Optane DC Persistent Memory), dual 10Gb/s SFP+, and dual Gigabit Ethernet ports. Making this one of their flagship storage products, this 4U barebones server can handle thirty-six 3.5-inch SATA/SAS drive bays and two 2.5-inch SATA SSD bays for the boot device.

The Gigabyte S451-3R0 comes equipped with dual 1200 Watt 80 PLUS Platinum redundant power supplies. The Gigabyte motherboard used by this barebones server platform is the MD61-SC2. The Gigabyte MD61-SC2 employs an Aspeed AST2500 BMC, two U.2 PCIe Gen3 x4 interfaces, and four PCI Express Gen3 expansion slots.

Included with the S451-3R0 is a rail mounting kit, two CPU heatsinks (25ST1-353105-T1R), and the dual 1200 Watt power supplies. There is also an option for upgrading the power supplies to 1600 Watts if wanting to run 205 Watt TDP Xeon processors otherwise with the 1200W PSUs the stock rating is for 165 Watt CPUs. I was using the 205 Watt Xeon Platinum 8280 processors without issue using the 1200 Watt power supplies, but then again I wasn't using the server configuration with fully maxed out storage, etc.


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