Good Cheap Server - HP Proliant Microserver 4 BAY - OWNERS THREAD

That makes sense. Thanks guys. Interesting on the pooling of storage

Given the N54L is designed for 4 drives, I'm thinking of now going with 3*2/3TB in RAIDZ1 as don't think my needs will go beyond 4/6tb for a while. I guess down the line I could either grow it by replacing with bigger drives or build another!

The other alternative seems for 4 drives seems to be a mirror of 2*2/3tb and then add another 2*Xtb in down the line, but at the cost of less 'efficient' use of the drives by using mirror rather than Z1 etc.

For critical data (basically photos) I plan to backup to Amazon glacier to mitigate risk of catastrophic failure, so don't need higher levels of redundancy which seems to be what RAIDZ2 seems to give you.

Anything i'm missing?
 
Can someone point me in the right direction of which RAM I should be getting. Also, how much I'd need for a storage/media encoding sever.

I see people recommending caviar red hard disks...are they the ideal ones?

Would want a way to get the full 6gb/s out of them too...


Best way of getting USB 3 on these too?
 
.temp said:
Can someone point me in the right direction of which RAM I should be getting. Also, how much I'd need for a storage/media encoding sever.

I see people recommending caviar red hard disks...are they the ideal ones?

Would want a way to get the full 6gb/s out of them too...


Best way of getting USB 3 on these too?
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Ideally you want ecc ram but you can use regular DDR3, see this link

http://n40l.wikia.com/wiki/Memory

Quite a few people use the WD reds, they are designed for NAS and are pretty fast too. You can get them in 4TB now, bit pricey mind.

I wouldn't worry about 6GB/s with mechanical HDD's, they will never max 3GB/s.
 
Doesn't the N54L only go up to SATA 2? So you would not be able to utilise SATA 3 speeds anyway.

EDIT - maybe not. Looks like the 5th SATA port (used for the 5.25" bay) can be upped to SATA through a BIOS mod.
 
Dang, memory is expensive these days, I remember when I built my main PC earlier in the year I picked up 16Gb of XMS3 for about £60... Now it's looking like for 16Gb it's going to cost more than the microserver (especially for ECC)

Is it really necessary to get ECC for a home use NAS/server/lab? There must be plenty of other potential sources of problems happening (e.g. server not on a UPS) and it's not a business critical system or anything. At this point I'm sort of stuck between buying 1x8Gb stick of ECC (and maybe putting it alongside the existing 2Gb for 10Gb overall - think someone mentioned this working a few posts back) or getting by for now and hoping to pick up 16Gb at a later date (but surely 2Gb is not enough RAM for running VMs or even for nas4free/freenas). Hmmmmm
 
Non-ecc memory is fine, I belive most people use the cheap Kingston/corsair stuff.

My server has 8gb, 4gb assigned to free as I only have 2tb of storage at the moment and the other 4gb for esx/other vms
 
Dumb question ahead. It says to circle the "part code" on the invoice, does that mean the model ID? Or an actual serial ID?
 
Thanks for the thread update chaps, managed to check myself one at £193 delivered (Northern Ireland and all!). Makes a quare change from the regular charge of £20 when getting PC components delivered.
 
Is it right to be paying about £100 for 16gb ecc memory?

Can see that cashback going on the memory alone. Think I may look at just going up to 4gb or 8gb max at the mo.

If I get 2 caviar red drives (2TB each), could I setup a RAID5 with the 250gb that's included as the drive for the parities?
 
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.temp said:
Is it right to be paying about £100 for 16gb ecc memory?

Can see that cashback going on the memory alone. Think I may look at just going up to 4gb or 8gb max at the mo.

If I get 2 caviar red drives (2TB each), could I setup a RAID5 with the 250gb that's included as the drive for the parities?
Click to expand...

RAID 5 needs 3 drives of equal size minimum, eg 3 x 2tb giving 4tb usable space
 
You could setup RAIDZ under ZFS so that all 3 of the drives have an effective capacity of 250Gb, with one being parity - you'd have a total of 500Gb usable space overall BUT it would mean you can later replace the 250Gb with a 3rd WD Red 2Tb and expand the array to 6Tb Total / 4Tb Usable... I guess it really depends how long the wait will be to get the extra drive

I'm thinking of going for 8Gb ECC by way of 2x 4Gb sticks for around the £60 mark... since from what I can tell 8Gb ECC is fairly similar price to non-ECC, and 16Gb is way too expensive for me whether it's ECC or not... I'll stick the 2Gb that comes with the server up for sale to help offset things
 
uncle_rufus said:
Well that's the same position I'll be in so quite reassuring... Did you try to do any sort of testing to make sure recovering the array works as intended? I was contemplating trying to grab a bunch of 3 or 4 old disks and try setting up the VM and a RAIDZ with 3 disks say, stick some test data on them and then unplug one disk to see what happens, try replacing it with a different disk and check that the array rebuilds correctly etc before I put in proper drives and start filling it with more important stuff. Can't decide if this is a bit too paranoid, I just figure when something goes wrong in the future it would be far less stressful at least having some experience of the recovery procedure
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I've had mine going for a year now and i've not had a single data error. Using RDM's I've swapped out two drives and rebuilt with no data loss.

When you make your RDMs it's a good idea to include the drive serial number in the filename so you don't pull out the wrong drive ;)

I've yet to try it with 3tb drives and I think there was a thread a few months ago which suggested it doesn't work, in that case i'm not sure what the work around would be as datastores also have a 2tb limit.
 
mctiny said:
RAID 5 needs 3 drives of equal size minimum, eg 3 x 2tb giving 4tb usable space
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Bugger

Different idea then. Get 2x 2TB drives, don't RAID them. Use 250gb drive as OS drive for now. Use this until I can afford to upgrade more.
 
Uhtred said:
I've had mine going for a year now and i've not had a single data error. Using RDM's I've swapped out two drives and rebuilt with no data loss.

When you make your RDMs it's a good idea to include the drive serial number in the filename so you don't pull out the wrong drive ;)

I've yet to try it with 3tb drives and I think there was a thread a few months ago which suggested it doesn't work, in that case i'm not sure what the work around would be as datastores also have a 2tb limit.
Click to expand...

Sounds like good tips, thanks :D I seem to recall reading that the next version of EXSi increases that limit, haven't looked into it though. Do you happen to know if re-building an array on a ZFS system is particularly harsh on the disks? (Some seem to suggest that a danger is having a disk fail and then the rebuilding process on larger disks is enough to stress a 2nd disc into failing - screwing your whole array in the process :eek:)

.temp said:
Different idea then. Get 2x 2TB drives, don't RAID them. Use 250gb drive as OS drive for now. Use this until I can afford to upgrade more.
Click to expand...

I've thought about this also... Since I already have a 1TB disc with my data on... stick a 2nd 1TB alongside it for now, and just manually ensure my "important" data is copied onto both discs so I at least won't lose it if one of them fails. Then sometime down the line buy the extra discs required for RAID5/RAIDZ (and a decent sized external to copy data to when first building the array, and then to act as external backup).

In an ideal world I'd have 4x3Tb WD Reds to slam in there straight away, but the cost of getting them all at once is eye-watering to say the least :(
 
How does the esata deal with being out to sleep and awoken? I've not had a good experience with esata in the past.
 
uncle_rufus said:
Sounds like good tips, thanks :D I seem to recall reading that the next version of EXSi increases that limit, haven't looked into it though. Do you happen to know if re-building an array on a ZFS system is particularly harsh on the disks? (Some seem to suggest that a danger is having a disk fail and then the rebuilding process on larger disks is enough to stress a 2nd disc into failing - screwing your whole array in the process :eek:)
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VMFS5 increases the RDM limit, not the limit of datastores. Also remember that what you're doing with RDMs isn't supported by vmware and is a bit of a hack because it's making RDM's of a local disk rather than using a SAN.

Certainly while I was rebuilding my array it was quick, perhaps 5-6 hours and I could stream no problems while it was in progress. There are always risks with RAID which is why it is not considered to be a backup, and anything irreplaceable I have another copy of.


I've thought about this also... Since I already have a 1TB disc with my data on... stick a 2nd 1TB alongside it for now, and just manually ensure my "important" data is copied onto both discs so I at least won't lose it if one of them fails. Then sometime down the line buy the extra discs required for RAID5/RAIDZ (and a decent sized external to copy data to when first building the array, and then to act as external backup).

In an ideal world I'd have 4x3Tb WD Reds to slam in there straight away, but the cost of getting them all at once is eye-watering to say the least :(
Click to expand...

If you do decide to copy data from one drive to another then rsync is built into freenas, this maintains a copy of your files on a schedule (similar to robocopy) I actually have rsync with ssh to another freenas server over the internet to get an offsite copy.

Freenas is awesome but if you want more flexibility then there are other solutions out there, although maybe not free.
 
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Okay so I just sat down to give the microserver a try for the first time, stuck ubuntu server onto a USB stick and plugged it into the internal slot but I can't get into the BIOS... as soon as the splash screen goes away it sits at the post screen with the message

"Initializing USB Controllers..."

I tried leaving it for some time but it never changes, am I doing something wrong? (perhaps it's too late on a Friday night :s)

Edit: Okay unplugged the USB from inside and my USB keyboard and it now boots but of course then it has nothing to boot

Edit Edit (lol): Right so it just needed to sort the USB once with nothing plugged in and now it works, but my bootable Ubuntu stick doesn't get past the SYSLINUX copyright line and into the actual installer... Just whipping out some Google-fu to try and work out what the problem might be

Last Edit for tonight: Well duh I stupidly clicked the wrong syslinux when I created the bootable USB... all seems well now and is installing XD
 
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