Cheap alternative to Gen8

[saayinla]

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!

 

[saayinla]

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).

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.

 

[saayinla]

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.

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.

 

[saayinla]

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.

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.

 

[saayinla]

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.

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.