Microserver Replacement

faicec

faicec

faicec

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Joined
31 Dec 2006
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74
Location
Gloucester
Afternoon All,

My HP N36L Microserver is struggling under the pressure I'm putting it under to serve up media to various appliances around the house, while performing other tasks. More often than note, the CPU is at 100% utilisation.

It's been a little while, so I fancy building something to replace it. As I'm a bit rusty, some pointers on what to get will be much appreciated!

Items I need include the following:

CPU
Motherboard (RAID5 capable, 8x SATA for expansion)
PSU (enough SATA power for 8 drives)

I have a spare ATX case hanging around, and I intend on utilising the 2x4GB DDR3 DIMMS, and hard drives from the Microserver.

Budget, £200 for those 3 components. Will that get me something that can handle a moderate load?

Cheers,
Craig
 
I did the same and put together a system with all my HDDs based round a Q6600 running Windows 7 Pro with no probs. I had the board/memory/psu and just got the cpu from mm and the case from Overclockers.
 
Very few reasonably priced motherboard have more than 6 SATA ports and of those that do raid 5 is limited to 6 ports as the others are on a secondary controller.

Raid 5 is not that ideal, single drives can get close to saturation over Gbit connections while a backup solution is far more robust and allows for accidental deletion / corruption. Raid 5 is needed where you always need the data available, typically in industry whereas for a media server you can soon restore from a backup with no real headache. Probably better to keep one copy of the key data on a 2-4 GB external drive and just backup 'new' media in real time.

I have a N40L which I'm deciding what to do with as I moved my files to and AMD x4 640 on an old AM2+ motherboard which became redundant.

I wouldn't bother with low power CPU's as it really only matters at 100% load or where TDP is limited. My x4 640 (95W) actually idles a few watts below an X2 250U (25W) CPU. System spends most time at idle.

Buy a low wattage gold rated PSU - 300 - 400W, you may need a few SATA splitters

any modern dual or quad core will be fine as it will have a low idle power.

Choose a basic motherboard with 6 SATA, all the other features just add cost and power consumption. If you really need more SATA then consider UBSB 3.0 backup,or set the N36L up as a NAS storage / backup target only with a little extra memory or just add a cheap SATA card for extra ports.

Also worth ditching any smaller discs to keep numbers of spindles (power) in check. These can usually be sold on to offset costs.


AD
 
I put together i3-3220 and a B75 pro3-m + be-quiet 400w gold power supply + 128gb crucial m4

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MB-086-AK

This mobo has 8 sata ports, 5 sata 2 + 3 sata 3

And that will cost you around £200 new excluding the SSD

It idles @ 25-30 watts.

OCUK says it has only 6 ports, this is an error

MB_086_AK_53848_600.jpg
 
Last edited:
daveip said:
on a £200 budget? doesn't need haswell for the application
Click to expand...

Yes haswell, you can get a cheap b85 board and a pentium G3220 for not a lot more than £100. It would be the route id go for anyway to get the most power efficient system. Ram is the only expensive part but you could either use the stuff from the micro server (if it uses DDR3) or get a single 4gb stick.
 
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