Reply 20 of 57, by Kahenraz
- Rank
- l33t
I have run my NAS and backup server runs on a Supermicro H8DGI-F motherboard for almost 10 years now and have had at least two similar incidents with the motherboard. Once, after working inside of the case to perform regular maintenance, the board failed to boot and would only display a green LED on the motherboard. Another time I had a similar experience but after trying to reset the BIOS with a jumper and rebooting several times I just left it alone on the black screen after turning it on and it "eventually" booted itself up and has continued to run without any problem.
I actually have a box of, I think, two or three replacement boards ready to go, just in case I need them in the future. Considering the cost of parts invested and the time is would take to buy new parts and validate a complete replacement, I decided to spend a couple hundred dollars buying extra motherboards to hedge against any future failures.
I have no interest in replacing this system as I have hundreds of dollars, maybe more, invested in about 256GB of RAM (expandable to 512GB). That was a hell of a lot of memory back in the day and I don't want it have to obsolete it by necessity due to a failure induced upgrade. I will run this system into the ground and it would need to catch fire or suffer some other catastrophic failure before I would even consider replacing it.
I don't think that these boards are unreliable. My guess is that they are just so extremely dense component-wise that there are more opportunities for something to go wrong.
I wanted to highlight though that I too had a seemingly dead server board come back to life. I've always wondered if the first board would have come back to life as well had I left it to sit at bootup like the second one.