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Removable drive tray accessory for Supermicro SYS-E302-12x fanless chassis

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For those in the market for a small form factor (SFF) Supermicro kit, you might be interested in a new removable drive tray accessory that I was just made aware by the Supermicro team. This new removal drive tray is only compatible with the new Supermicro SYS-E302-12x fanless chassis, which is the foundational chassis for a number of recent offerings from Supermicro including:

Note: I also wrote about the SYS-E302-12D last year, which you can read the full review HERE.

Here are a few pictures that was provided to me by Supermicro on what the drive tray looks like both from the side and top:

The drive tray will support both a 7mm or 8.5mm drive and will be one of the accessories that you can either purchase directly from Supermicro or one of their many authorized resellers.


The drive tray also reminded me of the removable M.2 NVMe to PCIed enclosure by Icy Dock in case you have a kit that supports full PCIe slot which is quite nice for hot-plug/remove capabilities.

First look at the new Supermicro E302-12D (Ice Lake D)

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The Intel Xeon D embedded SoC product line is an amazing platform and has been extremely popular amongst VMware customers for VMware Homelabs and running workloads both in the Datacenter and at the Edge using kits like the Supermicro E200-8D and E300-9D to just name a few. While the E200-8D/E300-9D still remain popular, they are slowly coming up on their end of life support, Q1 2023 and Q1 2025 respectively.

Intel Ice Lake D is the first major architectural refresh of the Intel Xeon D product line, which is quite exciting for those looking to upgrade and take advantage of all the latest hardware capabilities this new platform as to offer! Two Ice Lake D kits that I am really excited for is the Supermicro E300-12D and E302-12D, both of which leverage the new Ice Lake D SoC. As a E200-8D owner, my only real nit pick is with the noise of the fans which can sound like a jet engine when using the stock fans. Although I have replaced the stock fans with the much quieter Noctua fans, under higher load the system is still audible and some in the community have also reported that it may still not be enough to cool system.

If I had to start all over again, I certainly would be looking at one of the new fanless kit from Supermicro! I was fortunate enough to get my hands on the upcoming Supermicro E302-12D system, a fanless Ice Lake D kit which has a similiar design to the existing E300-9D.

So here is your first sneak peak at this new Ice Lake D platform! 😀

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First look at the Supermicro E100-12T

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I first came to learn about Supermicro's E100-9W platform last year, which I had first written about here. The E100-9W is a fanless kit that is part of Supermicro's Embedded IoT family and targets similiar use cases to the Intel NUC such as Industrial Automation, Retail, Smart Medical Systems, Kiosks and Digital Signage. Although the E100-9W was just released in 2020, it was actually using a much older Intel 8th Generation CPU due to some constraints with Intel's embedded CPU roadmap.

Supermicro did mention last year that a Tiger Lake-based model was in the works and last week, I just got my hands on a pre-production unit for their 2nd generation of this platform called the E100-12T.

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