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

I'm still running one of these but considering other options not really sure which way to go?

I have 8 SAS drives currently 4 in my microserver with hp sas card including battery backup and ssd.

Budget is around £400 I use it mostly for storage.
I ended up building my own server as couldnt find a suitable replacement for a relatively decent price.
I had some parts and a case so added to it and built my own, ended up with a server with more HD space, better spec and upgradeable etc.
 
I ended up building my own server as couldnt find a suitable replacement for a relatively decent price.
I had some parts and a case so added to it and built my own, ended up with a server with more HD space, better spec and upgradeable etc.

what did you go for parts wise?
 
I ended up building my own server as couldnt find a suitable replacement for a relatively decent price.
I had some parts and a case so added to it and built my own, ended up with a server with more HD space, better spec and upgradeable etc.

I did the same, went from the Gen 7, to the Gen 8, by the time I was ready to replace it, HP had done nothing in the same league.
Currently running an NR200 with 28Tb of storage in there.
 
I mentioned this elsewhere.
I stopped using the N54L a little while back for our home media needs and bought a cheap N100 powered NUC, not as cheap now.
At the time the NUC, including W11 Pro was less than £70.
I then bought a five disk DAS and attached that via USB. The NUC having got a 2.5Gb LAN, good enough for our needs.
 
I mentioned this elsewhere.
I stopped using the N54L a little while back for our home media needs and bought a cheap N100 powered NUC, not as cheap now.
At the time the NUC, including W11 Pro was less than £70.
I then bought a five disk DAS and attached that via USB. The NUC having got a 2.5Gb LAN, good enough for our needs.

I've been thinking about doing somthing like this, then my mind drifted to getting a CWWK MOBO with built in CPU, maybe a N100, or a stronger N355. Then the prices of these shot up. My current thinking is getting a second hand 12100 i3 and pairing it with a MATX MOBO, though not sure which one. It should give quite a bit more grunt and still be power efficient. My N40L is still currently chugging along nicley.
 
I ended up going down the custom route as my Gen10 was starting to show it's age.

Spec:
Jonsbo N3 NAS Case
TopTon N17 Ryzen 7840HS Mini-itx motherboard
32GB DDR5
IBM M1015 - Flashed with LSI IT Firmware
 
I've been thinking about doing somthing like this, then my mind drifted to getting a CWWK MOBO with built in CPU, maybe a N100, or a stronger N355. Then the prices of these shot up. My current thinking is getting a second hand 12100 i3 and pairing it with a MATX MOBO, though not sure which one. It should give quite a bit more grunt and still be power efficient. My N40L is still currently chugging along nicley.


My NL40, like the NL54, are just sitting in the loft, could be used at some point maybe. It was just an opportunity for the cheap price of the NUC with a 2.5Gb LAN and the cheap offer on the five disk DAS that I decided for the cost it would be worth doing.
Anything else, maybe more so with today's pricing, was just not going to offer enough of a difference over what I had already to get my head around d spending on something that was not absolutely needed.
 
This was Jan last year

I spent a hair under £650 for everything including a 500GB NVME and Power supply.

The same SKU Ram that I bought almost a year ago to the day is now very near half my original spend

Nice price.

Still dont have a clue what to go for 400-600 is my budget.

I already have 10x4tb sas drives and psu also it mode sas card just need the rest budget doesnt include case cost.
 
Nice price.

Still dont have a clue what to go for 400-600 is my budget.

I already have 10x4tb sas drives and psu also it mode sas card just need the rest budget doesnt include case cost.

Your problem is really going to come down to the number of drives you're looking to run. Up to 4 bays and there's plenty of solutions out there. 10 bays though starts to scale up the price unless you go for something custom.
 
Nice price.

Still dont have a clue what to go for 400-600 is my budget.

I already have 10x4tb sas drives and psu also it mode sas card just need the rest budget doesnt include case cost.

How bout something like this...

 
Nice price.

Still dont have a clue what to go for 400-600 is my budget.

I already have 10x4tb sas drives and psu also it mode sas card just need the rest budget doesnt include case cost.

Being brutally honest, I think you're going to struggle given the current landscape.

If you're happy with something ATX Form factor then £650 gets you a 12400, Gigabyte TUF Gaming B760 and 32GB Kingston Fury Beast (£70 off today) and leaves you to pick your poison as far as case is concerned. If you wanted smaller Form Factor Mini Itx will be limiting for something that will support 10 3.5" disks but a Minisforum BD895i SE paired with the Kingston 32GB RAM right now would come out to a little over £700, and is about 10% faster single threaded and 50% faster multithreaded than the 12400 (The topton N17 bought is fairly on par with a 12400 and is about £320 at the moment vs £395 for the MinisForum)

10x4TB SAS drives are going to be Hot, Loud and power hungry
 
Being brutally honest, I think you're going to struggle given the current landscape.

If you're happy with something ATX Form factor then £650 gets you a 12400, Gigabyte TUF Gaming B760 and 32GB Kingston Fury Beast (£70 off today) and leaves you to pick your poison as far as case is concerned. If you wanted smaller Form Factor Mini Itx will be limiting for something that will support 10 3.5" disks but a Minisforum BD895i SE paired with the Kingston 32GB RAM right now would come out to a little over £700, and is about 10% faster single threaded and 50% faster multithreaded than the 12400 (The topton N17 bought is fairly on par with a 12400 and is about £320 at the moment vs £395 for the MinisForum)

10x4TB SAS drives are going to be Hot, Loud and power hungry

ATX is fine I was looking at case wise either Fractal R5 or Jonsbo N5 (not sure about last one appears very overpriced)

I have the 10 drives already which is why I wanted to use them prefer it in one unit but if have to can have them separate.

The sas drives are not loud or hot these are not the high spec 12Gb/s but mid ones same speed as sata (got them from old work place they had spares which never got used now upgraded to ssds so didn't require them)
 
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It sounds like the first step would be to consolidate onto some bigger drives to be honest. I hate paying for storage that doesn't achieve any actual upgrade, but it's probably true.
 
ATX is fine I was looking at case wise either Fractal R5 or Jonsbo N5 (not sure about last one appears very overpriced)

I have the 10 drives already which is why I wanted to use them prefer it in one unit but if have to can have them separate.

The sas drives are not loud or hot these are not the high spec 12Gb/s but mid ones same speed as sata (got them from old work place they had spares which never got used now upgraded to ssds so didn't require them)
Feel free to ignore me, but running 10x4TB SAS isn’t a great idea in most situations, and almost all situations in a home environment.

Sticking to a Consumer orientated set-up with fewer bays and larger drives will save you a small fortune on controllers, cooling, power, chassis/backplanes/rails/racks, UPS and cables. Even just running 10 drives means either two controllers, or jumping upto a 9300-16i or for power efficiency reasons a 9305-16i. With ZFS you are spinning up the whole vdev to do anything significant, or just read a file not in cache. UR is slightly better, but honestly, Jonsbro using consumer/SMB grade and then upgrade the drives when you run out of storage, 10x4TB is not doing you any favours here.
 
Feel free to ignore me, but running 10x4TB SAS isn’t a great idea in most situations, and almost all situations in a home environment.

Sticking to a Consumer orientated set-up with fewer bays and larger drives will save you a small fortune on controllers, cooling, power, chassis/backplanes/rails/racks, UPS and cables. Even just running 10 drives means either two controllers, or jumping upto a 9300-16i or for power efficiency reasons a 9305-16i. With ZFS you are spinning up the whole vdev to do anything significant, or just read a file not in cache. UR is slightly better, but honestly, Jonsbro using consumer/SMB grade and then upgrade the drives when you run out of storage, 10x4TB is not doing you any favours here.

So how does having multi smaller units make it better?

With the one setup you have 1 controller (LSI 9207-8i is the one I currently have with all the cables)

10x4gb sas drives which are not high end ones they pull 5w each (so around 50w)

I need this much space so what alternative is there apart from paying more money for fewer drives that are larger capacity.

Open to suggestions.
 
So how does having multi smaller units make it better?

With the one setup you have 1 controller (LSI 9207-8i is the one I currently have with all the cables)

10x4gb sas drives which are not high end ones they pull 5w each (so around 50w)

I need this much space so what alternative is there apart from paying more money for fewer drives that are larger capacity.

Open to suggestions.
How are you planning connecting 10 drives to two ports, which only support 4 drives each natively, eg without a backplane? You aren't. You either need to buy a case with a backplane, a second card, or an enclosure. You could run a shelf, but just powering it at idle will cost you something around £200/yr by the time you cool it, you could buy an old server and powering it at idle will cost you several times that, or you could sell what you have and run 4x10TB for a lot less. Work out £/Tb and then w/TB, both will lead you to a sweet spot and it's a lot cheaper to do with efficient consumer gear than old enterprise kit, trust me. Also how are you planning on moving out of the limitation of 4x10TB when you realise that you underestimated your needs?
 
How are you planning connecting 10 drives to two ports, which only support 4 drives each natively, eg without a backplane? You aren't. You either need to buy a case with a backplane, a second card, or an enclosure. You could run a shelf, but just powering it at idle will cost you something around £200/yr by the time you cool it, you could buy an old server and powering it at idle will cost you several times that, or you could sell what you have and run 4x10TB for a lot less. Work out £/Tb and then w/TB, both will lead you to a sweet spot and it's a lot cheaper to do with efficient consumer gear than old enterprise kit, trust me. Also how are you planning on moving out of the limitation of 4x10TB when you realise that you underestimated your needs?

10tb hdd start at £260 each. (4 of those as you mentioned £1040)

I was given a SAS extender with the SAS card I have. (0 cost I have so far with both those cards and the 10x4tb hdd)

Looked into the price I would get if I sold those 4tb SAS drives is around £110 for all of them so that is not really good value is it when the replacement for them would cost £1040.

So what consumer gear offers better value? you have only mentioned hdd those are not appearing to be better value.

If it was more practical etc I would have no issue using microserver still with another solution.
 
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