Cheap alternative to Gen8

saayinla

saayinla

saayinla

Associate
Joined
16 Oct 2007
Posts
197
Location
London
I am after a small cheap PC/server for use as my media server/storage at home. I have loads of movies and home videos in 4k format etc and I currently use proliant Gen8 but its giving me too much hassle with the Raid functaionality which I do not use as I use stablebit drive pool for pooling my drives.

And secondly I am moving away from internal drives since I can just plug in external drives. saves me trouble of chucking drives from an external USB drive. One of my drives has failed and I am replacing it with USB external.. cant be bothered with Internal anymore. Plus I ll rather just have a Windows 10 PC doing the job instead of running a Server OS etc.

ANy suggestion for a small box with 4-8 USB 3 ports etc with internal space for couple of sata drives to be complemented with external drives.

Dont want something too bit and not too hungry on electricity.. anything core i3 or i5 would be fine.

Used doesnt matter.

I am pulling my hair out on the Gen8 proliant server already!
 
Can't you disable the RAID functionality on the Gen8 and pass the drives through individually?

If you want more USB 3 ports you can add an adapter card.

Having a load of external drives connected as you describe sounds like a **** idea (personal opinion only, do what you want).
 
Lets start with the basics, Gen 8 and Proliant tell us very little about what you have, do you mean you have a mivroserver? Just as 'too much hassle with the Raid functaionality which I do not use' makes no sense - if you don't use RAID, it won't cause you any issues. Moving to externals is an absolutely horrible idea, you end up with a load of drives running via USB which require power and data connections that are going to be problematic sooner or later. USB hubs would work, but it's just a nasty way of doing things. The power concern is moot - an i3 and an i7 will idle at nearly identical power consumption levels thanks to power gating.
 
bremen1874 said:
Can't you disable the RAID functionality on the Gen8 and pass the drives through individually?

If you want more USB 3 ports you can add an adapter card.

Having a load of external drives connected as you describe sounds like a **** idea (personal opinion only, do what you want).
Click to expand...

I totally understand where you are coming from, I ordinarily hate external drives. I had a couple of internal drives fail recently and it was a lot of hassle trying to get the data off them plus the complexity of the raid , I agree its a **** idea no doubt.

Do you know how to turn off the raid functionality, if I can manage to get an OS back on, I ll copy my data and disable the raid functionality.
 
If you Google 'hp microserver gen8 disable raid controller' there are instructions from HP. I haven't got a Gen8 so haven't tried them.

If you're setup correctly a failed drive is fixed by installing a new one and waiting for the array to rebuild. No reason to be messing around trying to get data off any drives.

If the data matters it should be backed up elsewhere anyway.
 
Avalon said:
Lets start with the basics, Gen 8 and Proliant tell us very little about what you have, do you mean you have a mivroserver? Just as 'too much hassle with the Raid functaionality which I do not use' makes no sense - if you don't use RAID, it won't cause you any issues. Moving to externals is an absolutely horrible idea, you end up with a load of drives running via USB which require power and data connections that are going to be problematic sooner or later. USB hubs would work, but it's just a nasty way of doing things. The power concern is moot - an i3 and an i7 will idle at nearly identical power consumption levels thanks to power gating.
Click to expand...

Hi Thanks.

I have a Gen8 Microserver. My second one infact, I had the N40L Amd version previously had it for 5 solid years before moving to this gen8 last year.

Unfortunately when I setup the drives, I did although I do not have an parity setup etc, I am using each disc as it is, but because the HP raid array controller is managing the disc, IF i remove any of my drives without going through the normal process from the Raid setup then I cant access the data on it. However what I use my drives for, would be fine just presenting them to the OS as is.

Hence my issue with the raid controller. I use Stablebit for pulling my data to one drive which works for my needs.
 
bremen1874 said:
If you Google 'hp microserver gen8 disable raid controller' there are instructions from HP. I haven't got a Gen8 so haven't tried them.

If you're setup correctly a failed drive is fixed by installing a new one and waiting for the array to rebuild. No reason to be messing around trying to get data off any drives.

If the data matters it should be backed up elsewhere anyway.
Click to expand...

Exactly the important data that I have are backup elsewhere in multiple locations, I dont want to be going through the hassle of rebuilding if a drive fails hence, If i lose a drive I want to just take it out and put another one in, these are just media files which are of no importance to me.
 
So you cocked up when setting up windows server and then compounded the issue by chucking stablebit in for good measure? Why not just.. you know... set it up properly? Even putting W10 on it (horrible idea for a file server, consider unraid) and setting it up properly will solve your problem.
 
Avalon said:
So you cocked up when setting up windows server and then compounded the issue by chucking stablebit in for good measure? Why not just.. you know... set it up properly? Even putting W10 on it (horrible idea for a file server, consider unraid) and setting it up properly will solve your problem.
Click to expand...

Thats what I am trying to do now , but need to get windows running first so I can salvage the important stuffs before I disable the raid functionality, getting windows to install without issue is the problem at the moment. Once I can overcome this I ll pretty much start all over.
 
Probably the best route, the hardware you have is generally solid as pong as you don’t need to do transcoding, otherwise you’ll need a GPU to do the heavy lifting or you’re back to replacing the microserver. They’re still hard to beat for the money as a low power home storage server.
 
As he's talking about a gen8 server rather than a gen10 then transcoding isn't that bad once you upgrade the dual core celeron processor with something with more umph (e.g. 1260L (4c/8t) for about £60 off the popular auction site and takes about 10mins to fit).
 
memyselfandi said:
As he's talking about a gen8 server rather than a gen10 then transcoding isn't that bad once you upgrade the dual core celeron processor with something with more umph (e.g. 1260L (4c/8t) for about £60 off the popular auction site and takes about 10mins to fit).
Click to expand...

That’ll do 3 1080 h264 transcodes at full chat, throw HEVC into the mix and it gets nasty quite quickly, my suggested and preferred route would be a cheap Quadro m2000 (10+ 1080 h264 transcodes) or a suitably sized 960/1050 with patched drivers, you’d either need windows for HEVC decode support or to patch Ubuntu/Debian last I looked to get NVDEC and it’s not perfect, but either way for similar money, it adds a lot more capability for similar money to a 1260L and without the dubious pleasure of paying over the odds for a 1260L or sourcing the heat-pipe cooler for anything better.
 
I started to hit the limitations of my gen 7 microserver, its really rather slow and i saw pfsense load up to 100% quite a lot which was not great seeing as i had only two vms running.
The later versions are still pricey on the bay so i just bought a proliant dl380 g7 with twin 6 core xeons and currently 32gig of ram which will do to get it running with my lan VMs - will prob pick up another 32 or so gig in a little while which will be cheep as chips.
Doesnt have any drives though, not a big deal as i dont need a lot of space right now and i have 3tbs worth in my old microserver anyway - but will prob add 5 or 6 sas drives in a month or two.

Ok its going to be noisy as hell and i aint decided where to put it yet, and it will use more power than the microserver but prob not a lot more depending on drives that is. Does give me a lot of grunt and space options down the line though.
 
Avalon said:
That’ll do 3 1080 h264 transcodes at full chat, throw HEVC into the mix and it gets nasty quite quickly, my suggested and preferred route would be a cheap Quadro m2000 (10+ 1080 h264 transcodes) or a suitably sized 960/1050 with patched drivers, you’d either need windows for HEVC decode support or to patch Ubuntu/Debian last I looked to get NVDEC and it’s not perfect, but either way for similar money, it adds a lot more capability for similar money to a 1260L and without the dubious pleasure of paying over the odds for a 1260L or sourcing the heat-pipe cooler for anything better.
Click to expand...

What? A 1260L is like £60 where a quadro m2000 is best part of 3x that. Yes it might be a lot better but frankly it's significantly more cost and I'd hardly say £60 for that processor is over the odds.
 
Stephanie Peterson said:
and it will use more power than the microserver but prob not a lot more depending on drives that is.
Click to expand...

I think you'll be shocked at how much more power hungry a fully rackable server will be over a microserver even if it's running with no drives. The drives won't be consuming that much power, unless you've got shelves and shelves of them.
 
I run a QNAP 4 bay NAS because of the extra power even a Gen 8/10 microserver uses in comparison when running 24/7. Plus it's almos 1/4 the size. Coincidentally I just installed a Gen 10 m-server at work using Storage Pools (server OS) rather than the softRAID onboard controller which is a bit naff.

Mine is connected to a 4K TV for direct playback, runs PI-Hole in a VM, hosts a plex server and captures from 3 CCTVs. Not a cheap option after installing 4 x 4 TB WD Red drives but has been running for almost 2 years now faultlessly. Just search the QTS apps for how many additional things you can do with it.

I can only upgrade my TS-453B unit for SSD caching + 10 GbE Ethernet as it's PSU limited but the later units will accept an nVidia GPU as well for more functionality.

I'm sat next to a server room with hundreds of 1U HP servers and wouldn't have one anywhere near my house despite having disposed of many servers over the years. Very noisy and power hungry little buggers comparitively! Flip side is some have been running for 7 years with maybe 2 or 3 power down events and I've only had to swap out the odd SAS drive.
 
Last edited:
Stephanie Peterson said:
Ok its going to be noisy as hell and i aint decided where to put it yet, and it will use more power than the microserver but prob not a lot more depending on drives that is.
Click to expand...
Semple said:
I think you'll be shocked at how much more power hungry a fully rackable server will be over a microserver even if it's running with no drives. The drives won't be consuming that much power, unless you've got shelves and shelves of them.
Click to expand...

G7's aren't actually that bad - when we upgraded our PFSense box from a G5 to a G7, I seem to think the power consumption ended up at something like 80 Watts.


Steveocee said:
Don't be offended at the extra long POST times either, they do take a good couple of minutes to test the RAM and boot.
Click to expand...

Absolutely - a few times we've rebooted them at work and are like "is it going to do anything?". It's like 45 seconds with just a flashing cursor, then another 30 seconds on a text mode pre-bios, then another minute of Graphical bios, then another minute or two of iLO, smartarrays and anything else. :)
 
My DL380G7 pulls about 120Watts with 2 6 core processors (i forget the model but its the lower power option), 128GB of ram, 2x 1TB 2.5" HD and 2x 500GB SSD and isn't very noisy at all ... but its not on all the time unlike my microservers. Personally I don't think much about the length of the boot time ... but I used to support RS6000 J50's which would take 45mins to boot in fast mode!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom