Lenovo ThinkSystem ST250 V2 Internal Overview
Inside the system, we should start with the door panel. Lenovo has a service guide printed on the door which is always a nice feature.
Inside, this looks a lot like a normal desktop tower or a tower server. The Power supply is at the top, storage at the front, motherboard in the middle, and fans blowing through the chassis.
The processor is an Intel Xeon E-2300 series and the heatsink/ fan unit looks like one taken from a 20 year old PC. Luckily, these are only 95W TDP CPUs, so we do not need the higher-end cooling we see on the desktop and higher-end server side.
Memory wise, one can get up to 128GB (32GB x4) of DDR4 ECC UDIMMs. The ST250 V3 is the newer version that supports DDR5.
There is an option to use Pentium processors instead of the Xeon E-2300 series. If you do that the memory speed drops to DDR4-2666 from the DDR4-3200 we get with the Xeon E-2300 series.
In the bottom section of the motherboard, we find the Intel C256 PCH under a small heatsink. There are various SATA connectors and you can see the four available connectors that would connect to another four SATA drives if we had them in our center section.
That brings us to another feature. Those 8x 3.5″ front drive bays can either be 8x SATA or 7x SATA and 1x NVMe. This is the header one would use with that second configuration.
In terms of PCIe slots, we get four. This was a PCIe Gen4 generation platform, so we cannot use PCIe Gen5 devices at full speed. The PCIe configuration is x4, x16, x4, x4.
Installed we can see the Lenovo Broadcom 10Gbase-T NIC.
For the onboard networking, Lenovo is also using Broadcom with the BCM5720 on the motherboard powering the 1GbE ports.
We can also see the ASPEED Pilot 4 on the motherboard.
Something very notably absent here is a M.2 slot. It seems like Lenovo is using the PCIe lanes for the PCIe slots instead of M.2 here.
Next, let us get to the topology.
“Our system was interesting since it came with a single 550W redundant power supply.”
I think this should read non-redundant. I don’t see a second PSU in the photos!
There’s a fixed psu option on these. This has the redundant option, but it only has 1 of the two installed. It’s strange that there’s only 1 in here and there isn’t 2. So it’s a non-redundant power supply unless you add a 2nd, but it’s got the redundant psu option, and that’s what they’re saying.
Thank you for a good review of this successor to my beloved ThinkServer TS family. (For the less than avid fans, TS stands for Tower form factor, Single processor.)
Glad to see the rotation guide for the rubber feet has been added to the inside diagram. It can be hard to remember how when the machine you’re working on is also the Internet proxy, so no YouTube or Reddit.
The biggest issue I have with these “rackable” tower servers is that it’s harder than heck to actually source all the needed bits. Even just finding what part numbers to search for can be a big headache.