The ASRock Rack 1U12E-GENOA/2L2T is a long product name, but it combines an AMD socket SP5 processor plus a number of NVMe drives all into a 1U chassis. What is perhaps more notable with this solution is that there are a total of 24x DDR5 DIMM slots for the single CPU. If you are a memory capacity enthusiast, this has something very different for you.
ASRock Rack 1U12E-GENOA/2L2T External Hardware Overview
The front of the system is dominated by drive bays. While a few years ago, 10x SSDs were considered dense, ASRock Rack fits 12x 2.5″ NVMe SSDs on the front of the chassis. Notable here is that these are PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD bays.
There is not a lot of room on the front for other features, so we see things like the USB 3 port on the left side of the system.
On the right rack ear, we get the power reset buttons and the status LEDs.
Part of how ASRock Rack is fitting this many drives into a chassis is the drive trays. One can see that, unlike many 12-bay 1U trays these even have sides, albeit with thin metal. We were a bit surprised with how well these trays performed compared to our normal 12-bay 1U experiences.
Moving to the rear of the server, we have two Delta 1kW power supplies.
Next to the power supplies, we have the rear I/O block. Here we have a management port, two USB 3 ports, and a VGA port. There are four NICs that could use better labeling. Two are Intel i210 1GbE NICs and two are Broadcom BCM57416 NICs.
On the rear of the system, we get three expansion slots. Two are PCIe Gen5 x16 full-height single slots. One is an OCP NIC 3.0 slot.
Next, let us get inside the system to see how it works.
I thoroughly enjoyed the article, Patrick. New platform, new words and ideas; and i appreciate the almost total absence of copy and paste in the article :)