The Specs

Below you can find the detailed specs.

Advatronix Cirrus 1200 (version 2013)
CPU & RAM Intel Xeon E3-1265LV2 4C/8T (2.4 GHz, 8MB L3)
Up to 32GB of ECC DDR3 UDIMMs dual channel, 1600 MHz
Motherboard Supermicro X9SCL
Storage Drive Bays 12 x 3.5" hot swappable (hard drive cage)
Populated w 8x Seagate NAS HDD ST4000VN000 4TB—RAID-10
All HD write back caches disabled

6x 2.5'' hot swappable (SSD front drive cage)
Populated w 2x Intel SSD710 200GB—RAID-1
Controller Adaptec ASR71605Q with "MaxCache" and BBU Enabled
Cooling Front 80mm fan
Rear 2x 120mm fan
Top none
Left Side 80mm fan
Bottom none
I/O Ports 4x USB 2.0 front
2x USB 2.0 rear
2x RJ-45 Ethernet rear
PS/2 mouse and Keyboard
RJ-45 IPMI 2.0 Ethernet
VGA D-sub
Serial Com

Optional : 1x RJ45 10G Ethernet
Power Supply One 400W 80 Plus Gold PSU (not in our review unit) or
Dual Redundant Athena Power 500W AP-RRMUD6508 (review unit)
Case Dimensions Height 14" 13/16" (376mm)
Width 12" 1/2" (317,5mm)
Depth 12" 5.5/16" (313mm)
Weight—54 lbs (24.5 kg)
Prominent Features Cube design
Two large 3.5" disk enclosure with hot swappable drives and one
Pricing includes 12 SATA drives
Price starting at $4449 (with CentOS and 4GB of RAM)

Advatronix clearly targets people with demanding storage requirements: even the low-end configuration comes with ten 2TB SATA drives (RAID-5 + one hotspare) for your data, and two 250GB SSDs in RAID-1 for your boot disks. To keep the starting price low, the server only comes with 4GB RAM, which is a bad call in our opinion. Even if you use the Advatronix as a massive capacity NAS, the extra RAM is very helpful as the OS can use the RAM as file system cache. For $150, you can get 16GB, so it's not a big deal, but it would have been better to start with two 8GB DIMMs.

Serve it Yourself A Look Inside
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  • JohanAnandtech - Sunday, June 8, 2014 - link

    The last point is where you make a reasoning error. Most enterprises just do not want to build their own fileserver, otherwise there would be not NAS market.
  • sciencegey - Monday, June 9, 2014 - link

    I was using the last point as an example of what a SOHO could do, which this storage server is targeted at.
  • tential - Saturday, June 7, 2014 - link

    Why couldn't they just sell the case by itself.....

    I don't need a 4500 system, I need a decent case like that.
  • Aikouka - Monday, June 9, 2014 - link

    Yeah, I was hoping this was actually just a server case review. =(
  • AdvatronixSystems - Saturday, September 27, 2014 - link

    We do sell the case by itself! :)

    Please contact sales@advatronix.com if you're interested.
  • watersb - Sunday, June 8, 2014 - link

    Thanks for reviewing this. Very interested in storage servers. But at these price points, I'm still in "build-your-own" territory.
  • YouInspireMe - Sunday, June 8, 2014 - link

    I have truly enjoy reading and have learned so much observing the high level exchange of knowledge here on this site I wonder if you could offer a little insight to a less knowledgeable fan of this sight. Other than it being headless and having lower power consumption what are the advantages/differences between a standard server and dedicated PC with sharing on a local network.
  • JohanAnandtech - Monday, June 9, 2014 - link

    Thanks. Another advantage is the build-in BMC which allows you to do remote management (remote power on, remote console). The rest is rather obvious: very little time is needed to replace PSU and the disks. I would definitely like the latter in my desktop :-).
  • CalaverasGrande - Monday, June 9, 2014 - link

    this looks like a server from the 90's except with a powder coat finish! So it must be good?
  • RoboKaren - Wednesday, June 11, 2014 - link

    Why not look at the BackBlaze StoragePod 4.0 derived commercial product, the Storinator: http://www.45drives.com/products/

    If I had $5k to spend on storage, I'd give it a serious look.

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