Today we have the review of a server that may look a bit familiar. The ASRock Rack 1U24E1S-GENOA/2L2T is an alternative to the ASRock Rack 1U12E-GENOA/2L2T we reviewed with a twist. Instead of being limited to an AMD EPYC 9004 platform with twelve 2.5″ drive bays, the new version of the server introduces a 24-bay E1.S design for more storage density. To accomplish this, ASRock Rack had to make big changes throughout the system. Let us get into more details in our review.
ASRock Rack 1U24E1S-GENOA/2L2T External Hardware Overview
The server itself is a 1U design at around 776.5 or 30.6″ deep. Instead of a 2.5″ or 3.5″ front to the system, we have 24x E1.S EDSFF bays.
Cooling is a big deal in this chassis, so it is probably worth taking a second to just note that there is a vent area in the middle of the drive bays. That vent is directly in front of the AMD EPYC CPU socket in the server. This is a small detail, but it seems to be key for ASRock Rack delivering cool air to the CPU. We will go into more detail about the cooling in this server shortly.
On the left rack ear we get a USB port.
On the right we get our standard status LEDs and power button.
Going into the E1.S backplane a bit, here it is with two drives installed, so you can see how it works. Here we can see the vertical E1.S connectors.
The drives then fit into the slots.
Here is a Micron 7400 Pro with the drive latch installed for this system.
Here is another view of the heatsink side.
We got a box of 24 latches.
One of the big misses with EDSFF was not standardizing latches. Instead, some large OEMs wanted their own latches for branding purposes. As such, instead of getting drives with latches already installed, the industry has to install latches on every EDSFF server, which is silly.
If you want to learn more about EDSFF, E1.S, and so forth, you can check out E1 and E3 EDSFF to Take Over from M.2 and 2.5 in SSDs.
On the rear I/O of the system, we get a management port, USB ports, and a VGA port. Networking is provided by two 10Gbase-T ports powered by a Broadcom BCM57416, and two 1GbE ports powered by an Intel i210.
There is an additional PCIe Gen5 x16 single slot riser onboard.
There is also an OCP NIC 3.0 slot with external locking. This is our preferred OCP NIC 3.0 slot.
Power is provided via a pair of 1.6kW 80Plus Platinum PSUs. These are elongated and thinner to fit the rest of the motherboard.
Next, let us get inside to see how this works. ASRock Rack is doing something exciting with the cooling in this server.
