SDG #029 Server Build and MikroTik Follow Up - Part 2

This second part wraps up the hands-on work on the MikroTik RB2011UiAS-RM, a rack mount router that is popular with home lab and small business users but which runs hotter than many owners expect in a closed cabinet. Beyond the cooling additions covered previously, the focus here is a modification aimed at a weak point in the original design, the sort of fix worth knowing about if you are running one of these units continuously rather than on a bench. The takeaway for a prospective buyer is that the RB2011 remains good value for its port count and RouterOS feature set, but it benefits from some thermal help and a little rework if you want long term reliability under load.

The second half shifts to hardware planning: retiring an ageing Dell PowerEdge 2900 III with dual quad core Xeons in favour of a far more efficient single socket build around a Xeon E3-1275 on an Intel S1200BTL server board. That trade is a useful case study in why older enterprise iron often stops making sense. Idle power draw, noise and heat from a 2900 class chassis can easily outweigh the raw core count advantage once a modern Xeon with better per core performance is available.

Storage is the interesting part of the build. Four Samsung SSDs in RAID 10 handle fast working storage while eight Western Digital 2TB drives in RAID 10 provide bulk capacity, both fronted by Adaptec RAID controllers. Choosing RAID 10 over RAID 5 or 6 trades usable capacity for rebuild speed and write performance, a sensible priority when hosting virtual machines or databases rather than cold archives.