Gen8 1610T or QNAP

npfman

npfman

npfman

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23 Jul 2011
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63
Hi peeps,

Managed to get thr 16TB WD My Book on amazon for £420 recently.

Looking at removing the 2 x WD Red 8TB drives and placing them in either a QNAP or a HP Microserver Gen8

The Gen8 1610T is on offer currently for £180 with £60 cashback and was planning to install an i3 3240 and 16GB RAM, is this overkill for a media server.

I have an HTPC I built with the help of these forums in 2011 that is still going strong.

My plan was to buy either a QNAP enclosure or a Gen8 and place it in a spare cupboard as I've run Cat6 throughout my house.

What do you think the best options are? a QNAP TS-453 retails at about £380 and a Gen8 Microserver is working out at £120 after cashback, £100 for 16GB ECC RAM, £55 for a Samsung 120GB SSD and £75 for an i3-3240. Then do i need a iLo liscence etc, unsure what operating system to use but plan to run the drives as JBOD as its only for films/media storage.

By the way I've never setup a server before but found lots of guides on youtube :eek:

Cheers

Nick
 
To some extent it will depend on the airflow through your cupboard as the Gen8 will generate more heat than the QNAP, especially if you put an i3 3240 in it.
NAS4Free works well on the Gen8 and you'd probably get away with 8GB RAM as you wouldn't be using ZFS. You also wouldn't need the SSD, just a good USB stick such as this one. I'd also suggest an i3-3220T or 3240T rather than the 3240 to keep the heat generated down (and a £25 saving) although I suspect you don't really need more than standard.
I think a full ILO licence is worthwhile as it gives you the remote console and is only around £30 from eBai.
 
Hi

What are you planning to do with the server? Is it just a large NAS, streaming to multiple clients, on the fly transcoding? Plex instance, steaming externally.

Are you thinking Linux or Windows?

Not sure I'd worry about ILO if it's in the house. Once nas4free or similar is on a USB stick it all runs from. A web interface or terminal.

How will you have this backed up, lot of files to loose on JBOD.

The reds will have no warranty once removed from the WD book as they are classed as OEM so warranty with WD.

Depending on your needs, could just add the WD as a USB drive to your htpc and share from that.
 
Snapshot;30495474 said:
To some extent it will depend on the airflow through your cupboard as the Gen8 will generate more heat than the QNAP, especially if you put an i3 3240 in it.
NAS4Free works well on the Gen8 and you'd probably get away with 8GB RAM as you wouldn't be using ZFS. You also wouldn't need the SSD, just a good USB stick such as this one. I'd also suggest an i3-3220T or 3240T rather than the 3240 to keep the heat generated down (and a £25 saving) although I suspect you don't really need more than standard.
I think a full ILO licence is worthwhile as it gives you the remote console and is only around £30 from eBai.
Click to expand...

Hi,

Cheers very much for the reply, I'll have a look into NAS4Free, i've ordered the Gen8 1610T and will order that usb stick and get some RAM and also check the bay for the T processors, is there any online guides you know of for installed NAS4Free on a usb drive for the Gen8, ill keep searching haha

Cheers again
 
decto;30495945 said:
Hi

What are you planning to do with the server? Is it just a large NAS, streaming to multiple clients, on the fly transcoding? Plex instance, steaming externally.

Are you thinking Linux or Windows?

Not sure I'd worry about ILO if it's in the house. Once nas4free or similar is on a USB stick it all runs from. A web interface or terminal.

How will you have this backed up, lot of files to loose on JBOD.

The reds will have no warranty once removed from the WD book as they are classed as OEM so warranty with WD.

Depending on your needs, could just add the WD as a USB drive to your htpc and share from that.
Click to expand...

Cheers for reply, its just going to be a large NAS hopefully, serving mkv files to my current HTPC, 2011 built i5 2500K and GTX560Ti, was also planning on getting a Nvidia Shield, installing Kodi in a second room.

My current setup is 3 x 2TB WD Greens within the HTPC, i thought about JBOD as if lose the files wont take long to redownload them?, do you reccomend RAID or drivepool or something like that?

Cheers again

Nick
 
npfman;30495986 said:
Cheers for reply, its just going to be a large NAS hopefully, serving mkv files to my current HTPC, 2011 built i5 2500K and GTX560Ti, was also planning on getting a Nvidia Shield, installing Kodi in a second room.

My current setup is 3 x 2TB WD Greens within the HTPC, i thought about JBOD as if lose the files wont take long to redownload them?, do you reccomend RAID or drivepool or something like that?

Cheers again

Nick
Click to expand...

Hi,

If you can download them easily then less of a worry.
I ripped my collection myself, both films and series. Spent a lot of hours swapping disks and renaming files, organising etc. Would be painful to lose that lot as it would take a lot of effort to recreate. Time I don't have with young children in the house.

I have my files backed up to a number of old 1TB drives I had kicking about. If I lose a larger drive and am unlucky enough to lose a backup drive at the same time then chances are I'll only have to recreate part of the archive.

With the large drives you have anything other than mirroring becomes unworkable as it would take so long to rebuild a drive if one failed , you have a chance of a second drive failing during the stress of the recovery process. Drive pool or similar can work as they simply duplicate what you want to save over multiple drives and all data remains NTFS so if an one drive fails you can still read full files off the others.

The issue with any duplication is that it halves your available storage.

I'd be tempted to try the CPU before you upgrade, running as a NAS with a few clients will not stress the CPU at all. I currently have a N40L which can almost saturate gigabit Ethernet and that's even with the overhead of ZFS parity across 5 drives.

More CPU would help if you wanted to encode or transcode on the box or are planning to run a number of there services.

Regards

AD
 
npfman said:
Hi,

Cheers very much for the reply, I'll have a look into NAS4Free, i've ordered the Gen8 1610T and will order that usb stick and get some RAM and also check the bay for the T processors, is there any online guides you know of for installed NAS4Free on a usb drive for the Gen8, ill keep searching haha

Cheers again
Click to expand...
There are almost certainly guides on YouTube but I just read the on-line manual on the N4F web site plus a bit of rummaging on the forum. I burn the ISO to a CD and use a USB CD drive to install it; it may not be as fast as installing from USB stick but I have a lot of blank CDs.....
 
Ordered a Gen8 1610T with the cashback offer from HP, fitted 16GB ECC RAM and i3-3240, fitted Samsung 750 Evo in Bay 1 (Raid 0), WD 8TB's in Bay's 2 & 3 (Both RAID 0 Individually), updated iLo and HP Firmware to September 2016 update.

Tried installing Hyper-V as per Technut youtube guide but ended up installing Windows 7 x64 and works a treat, cheers for the advice.

The i3-3240 is installed with the standard G1610T cooler, getting max 75 degrees C when transcoding with plex, does this sound about right?
 
Temperature sounds a little high but then the TDP is higher than the 1610T. I've just ordered an i5-2390T that has the same tdp as the 1610T so I'm hoping to keep power and temp down but increasing speeds.

Curious as to why you've raid 0'd your data drives unless this is for learning and speed. I have raid 0 SSD for boot and then two raid 1's to store all my data.
 
Xez said:
Curious as to why you've raid 0'd your data drives unless this is for learning and speed. I have raid 0 SSD for boot and then two raid 1's to store all my data.
Click to expand...
The drives will be in four individual RAID 0s as advised in the HP microserver thread as this is the only way to make the fifth SATA port bootable when all four slots in the drive cage are in use.
 
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