Supermicro 4U Gold Series Storage
Sixty hot-swap bays, an Intel Xeon 6730P P-core CPU, 512 GB DDR5 and a Broadcom 3916 hardware RAID controller — pre-configured and shipped within 24 hours. We ran it through two weeks of hands-on testing across RAID rebuild, sequential throughput, thermal endurance and real MinIO S3 workloads.
🚚 Ships in 24 Hours
💾 60 × 24TB SATA HDDs — 1.44PB Raw
⚡ PCIe 5.0 + Broadcom 3916 HW RAID
🌐 Dual 25GbE SFP28
Full Chassis Gallery — Every Angle Examined
View 01 — Three-Quarter Angle
4U Rackmount Chassis — Angled View
The compact 4U top-loading chassis puts all 60 hot-swap 3.5″ bays front and centre. Dual 2000W Titanium PSUs sit at the rear. Fully populated with 60 × 24TB drives this unit weighs 107 lbs — plan accordingly.
View 02 — Front Panel
Front Panel — Top-Loading Drive Array
A hinged lid opens to expose all 60 bays for clean, tool-less hot-swap in a live rack. Status LEDs are clearly visible row-by-row. Front I/O includes power, UID and reset buttons plus a dedicated 1GbE BMC port for IPMI 2.0 remote management.
View 03 — Internal Layout
Under the Hood — Xeon 6 + Expander Backplanes
Two expander backplanes handle all 60 SAS/SATA drives. The X14SBSC motherboard sits rear-centre with 16 DDR5 DIMM slots and two fixed NVMe bays. The Broadcom 3916 card occupies a PCIe 5.0 x8 slot — factory cabling is clean and accessible.
View 04 — Rear Panel
Rear Panel — Dual PSU & Expansion Zone
Dual 2000W Titanium PSUs (96 % efficiency), two USB 3.0 ports, VGA, dedicated BMC LAN and up to five PCIe 5.0 expansion slots. The Gold config ships with a dual 25GbE SFP28 NIC already installed.
Complete Technical Spec Sheet
| Attribute | Technical Specification |
|---|---|
| Form Factor | 4U Rackmount — 447 × 177 × 813 mm (17.6″ × 6.96″ × 32″) |
| Chassis / Board | CSE-947STS-R2K05P / Super X14SBSC |
| Processor | 1× Intel® Xeon® 6730P — 32 P-cores / 64 threads, 2.5 GHz base, LGA-4710 Socket E2, up to 350 W TDP |
| Memory — Gold | 512 GB DDR5-5200 ECC RDIMM |
| Memory — Maximum | 2 TB DDR5-6400 (1DPC) or DDR5-5200 (2DPC) across 16 DIMM slots |
| Drive Bays | 60× 3.5″ SAS/SATA hot-swap, top-loading (expander backplanes) |
| NVMe / M.2 | 2× 960 GB U.2 NVMe SSD (internal fixed) + 2× M.2 PCIe 4.0 x2 |
| Raw Capacity | ~1.44 PB (60× 24 TB SATA HDDs, Gold config) |
| RAID Controller | Broadcom® 3916 HW RAID — RAID 0 / 1 / 5 / 6 / 10 / 50 / 60, BBWC-capable |
| Networking — Gold | 1× dual-port 25 GbE SFP28 NIC (PCIe add-on, factory installed) |
| PCIe Expansion | 1× PCIe 5.0 x8 HHHL + 3× PCIe 5.0 x16 HHHL + 1× PCIe 5.0 x4 |
| Power Supply | 2× 2000 W Redundant (1+1), Titanium Level 96 % efficiency |
| Rear I/O | 2× USB 3.0, 1× VGA, 1× RJ45 Dedicated BMC LAN (IPMI 2.0), TPM header |
| Cooling | Up to 6× Heavy Duty 8 cm + 1× Counter-Rotating 6 cm fan(s) |
| Management | SuperCloud Composer®, SSM, SDO, TAS, SAA |
| Operating Temp | 10 °C – 35 °C (50 °F – 95 °F) |
| Weight | 107 lbs (48.53 kg) net — Gross: 170 lbs (77.11 kg) |
| Availability | Gold Series — ships within 24 hours, pre-configured & validated |
Key Numbers
What We Liked, What to Watch
✅ Primary Strengths
- 1.44 PB raw capacity in 4U — exceptional density for rotating media
- Gold Series ships in 24 h — pre-validated, zero integration headaches
- Broadcom 3916 HW RAID — enterprise-grade data integrity with BBWC support
- Top-loading design makes live-rack drive swaps genuinely fast and safe
- Xeon 6730P P-cores handle on-box compression and erasure coding efficiently
- Dual 25GbE SFP28 NIC included — no extra NIC shopping required
- Titanium PSUs (96 % efficient) keep power costs manageable at scale
- PCIe 5.0 slots leave room to expand NVMe capacity or add 100GbE networking
⚠ Key Constraints
- 25GbE caps throughput for the Gold config — 100GbE requires an add-on card
- 107 lbs fully populated — needs two people and a proper server trolley
- HDD-based — not suited for IOPS-intensive or low-latency AI inference
- RAID 6 rebuild on a 24TB drive takes 48–96 hours — plan maintenance windows
- Single CPU socket — compute-bound storage software shares resources with I/O
Deep-Dive: 1.44PB in 4U, Done Right
The SSG-542B-E1CR60-01-G2 sits in a clear niche: maximum rotating-media density in a pre-validated, ship-in-24-hours package. We received the Gold Series unit from Supermicro UK fully populated with all 60 × 24TB drives, the Broadcom 3916 RAID card seated and the dual 25GbE NIC installed. Two weeks of testing later, here is what we found.
Storage Architecture — 60 Bays Done Right
Supermicro’s top-loading design is the right call for a 60-bay system. Open the hinged lid, slots are labelled, and drives drop straight in without reaching past cable bundles. Both expander backplanes support SAS and SATA 3.5″ drives, giving you flexibility to mix drive types as workloads evolve. In our RAID 6 configuration across all 60×24TB drives we had approximately 1.3 PB of usable space.
RAID Controller — Broadcom 3916
The 3916 is a solid choice for this class of system. It supports RAID 0, 1, 5, 6, 10, 50 and 60 with dedicated BBWC-backed cache and handles the expander backplanes cleanly on both Linux and Windows Server without driver complexity. Sequential read throughput reached ~2.1 GB/s in our testing — firmly capped by the 25GbE link. Swap in a 100GbE card and you’d comfortably push past 4 GB/s on large sequential reads.
Intel Xeon 6730P — Why P-cores in a Storage Box?
The 6730P is a P-core (performance core) chip. Supermicro’s rationale is sound: if you run S3-compatible object storage software on-box — MinIO, Ceph, or a software-defined storage stack — P-cores handle erasure coding, compression and metadata operations more efficiently than E-core variants. At 32 cores and 2.5 GHz base the 6730P sits at a practical midpoint: enough headroom for storage software stacks without paying for HPC compute you don’t need.
NVMe Tiering — The Two 960GB SSDs
The two internal U.2 NVMe SSDs cover three roles: OS boot, read-cache tier for the RAID array, or metadata and logging storage. In our setup — one OS drive, one read cache — the combination meaningfully reduced latency on repeated-access patterns like video editing workflows reading the same assets repeatedly. Four additional NVMe drives can be added via optional rear hot-swap bays with a PCIe add-on card.
Thermal & Power — Sustained Load Performance
We ran a six-hour full sequential write loop. Drive temperatures peaked at 41 °C — well within the 0–60 °C HDD operating envelope. Backplane temps stayed below 45 °C throughout. The counter-rotating rear fan pair proved its worth: the chassis never entered thermal throttle. Power draw at full load measured approximately 650 W at the wall. Idle with all 60 drives spun up: ~210 W. The Titanium PSUs are delivering real efficiency gains at scale.
Management — IPMI 2.0 and SuperCloud Composer
IPMI 2.0 over the dedicated BMC port delivers remote KVM, power control, sensor monitoring and iKVM without any additional software. Firmware updates via Supermicro Server Manager (SSM) were clean and required no downtime for BMC-level updates. For multi-node Supermicro deployments, SuperCloud Composer adds fleet-level visibility, alerting and lifecycle management in a single dashboard.
GO33 Hands-On Results
Tested: RAID 6 across 60×24TB SATA HDDs, dual 25GbE SFP28. FIO benchmarks + MinIO S3 real-workload simulation. Lab ambient 22 °C. Results from our direct hands-on testing.
Workloads Where This Server Excels
Media & Image Archives
Healthcare DICOM archives, broadcast media repositories and post-production asset storage. Write-once, read-occasionally patterns suit spinning HDD and 1.44PB holds years of data in a single 4U rack unit.
Data Lakes & AI Ingest
AI/ML pipelines need high-capacity landing zones for raw data before preprocessing. This box makes an excellent ingest and staging tier — fast enough for upstream collection, dense enough for months of telemetry or training datasets.
Government & Compliance
Long-retention regulatory requirements are well served by hardware RAID plus Supermicro’s enterprise management stack. Audit-friendly monitoring and lifecycle tools are built in.
Private Cloud Object Storage
S3-compatible object storage over 25GbE, RAID-protected bulk capacity tiers and fast drive swaps make this a natural fit for CSP and enterprise private-cloud deployments using MinIO or Ceph.
Telco & Content Distribution
Supermicro validates this platform for Telco use cases. High-bitrate media ingest, CDN origin storage and large-file content repositories all benefit from the density and throughput on offer.
Backup & Disaster Recovery
Affordable petabyte-scale backup targets on-prem. Hardware RAID provides primary data protection, and the NVMe tier accelerates catalog and deduplication metadata operations.
Your Questions Answered
Can I use SAS drives instead of SATA?
Yes. All 60 bays support both SAS and SATA 3.5″ drives. The Gold config ships with SATA for cost efficiency, but you can swap in SAS drives for higher duty-cycle or higher-reliability applications at any time.
What is the maximum memory this system supports?
The X14SBSC board supports up to 2 TB of DDR5 RDIMM ECC across 16 DIMM slots — DDR5-6400 in 1DPC or DDR5-5200 in 2DPC. The Gold config ships with 512 GB.
Can I upgrade to 100GbE networking?
Yes. Replace the included dual 25GbE card with a 100GbE NIC in one of the PCIe 5.0 expansion slots. With suitable switch infrastructure, sequential read throughput on large blocks would comfortably exceed 4 GB/s.
How long does a RAID 6 rebuild take on a 24TB drive?
Expect 48–96 hours for a full 24TB drive rebuild under normal operating conditions. Keep spare drives on-hand and plan maintenance windows accordingly for production deployments.
Does it work with MinIO or Ceph?
Yes. We tested it with MinIO over dual 25GbE during our review period and it performed reliably. The Xeon 6730P P-cores handle erasure coding and metadata operations efficiently, and the platform is validated for mainstream Linux-based software-defined storage stacks.
How quickly does it ship?
This is part of Supermicro’s Gold Series in-stock programme. Our test unit showed a 24-hour dispatch estimate at time of order. Configuration is fixed in the Gold spec — no lengthy BTO lead times.
Maximum Density, Zero Integration Headaches
The SSG-542B-E1CR60-01-G2 does exactly what it promises: 1.44 PB raw in 4U, hardware RAID, enterprise management, dual 25GbE and a 24-hour ship time. It’s not a performance server — IOPS are modest and the 25GbE NIC caps throughput — but for data lakes, media archives, backup tiers and object storage it is one of the most complete and immediately deployable options on the market in 2026. You’re not hunting for parts. You’re deploying.