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

[Armageus]

So how does having multi smaller units make it better?

Less power usage, less heat and less points of failure

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

Without a model number it will be hard to pin down, but assuming something like an older ST4000NM0125 that's 6.52W Idle / 7.74W average
Add in the Power requirements for the LSI SAS 9207-8i and that's another 9.8W (Worst case 16.0W according to spec sheet)

So that's ~87 Watts when in operation ( ~75 Watts idle)

A Modern WD Red Pro SATA (e.g. WD141KFGX 14TB) is 3.0W Idle / 6.2W Average.

4 of those = 24.8W Average and no separate HBA needed.


The energy saving from switching from 10 drives+HBA to 4 higher capacity SATA drives is £150/year

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

There isn't much of an alternative - if you need the storage space you need the storage space.

Switching to Unraid rather than ZFS and actually spinning the drives you have down would save more money (but again also has a purchase cost - of an Unraid license as well)

 

[Avalon]

Less power usage, less heat and less points of failure


Without a model number it will be hard to pin down, but assuming something like an older ST4000NM0125 that's 6.52W Idle / 7.74W average
Add in the Power requirements for the LSI SAS 9207-8i and that's another 9.8W (Worst case 16.0W according to spec sheet)

So that's ~87 Watts when in operation ( ~75 Watts idle)

A Modern WD Red Pro SATA (e.g. WD141KFGX 14TB) is 3.0W Idle / 6.2W Average.

4 of those = 24.8W Average and no separate HBA needed.


The energy saving from switching from 10 drives+HBA to 4 higher capacity SATA drives is £150/year

There isn't much of an alternative - if you need the storage space you need the storage space.

Switching to Unraid rather than ZFS and actually spinning the drives you have down would save more money (but again also has a purchase cost - of an Unraid license as well)

Someone else gets it

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.

How convenient that you forgot to mention the free expander, just as you chose to compare your used drives to new ones, inconvenient as it adds yet more power/cooling load

The last 10 x 10TB order I did of used drives cost me £433 delivered, with warranty, in fact I don't think I ever paid more than £6.50/TB on any 10-14TB purchase, I did splash out on the 16TB's going all the way to £8.12/TB, but I needed them for a ZFS VDEV. Even at £65/10TB, that's 40TB for £260, or £150 using your claimed £110 value on your other drives. Using your power numbers, that's 20w vs 50w, if you're going ZFS and spinning them 24/7, that's just over £63/yr savings based on 24p/Kw... which puts break even in year 3 (more likely year 2 factoring in your SAS expander's power use and the additional cooling of 10 drives vs 4). I run quite a bit of enterprise kit at home, and honestly, the most efficient builds are generally using a consumer grade PC case with fewer higher density drives as opposed to lots of lower density drives. You also enjoy access to much more efficient PSU's, the Corsair RM series for example, just the fan on my SM PSU's is 4w per PSU if I left both connected, and the load efficiency on an otherwise efficient build is horrific by comparison. Same story with fans,

If you want to run inefficiently, feel free, it's your money, but as someone who has done this for a lot of years and at scale, my way is more efficient and gives you more options, and trust me, you always need more storage than you plan for.

 

[edGfaCTor]

Less power usage, less heat and less points of failure


Without a model number it will be hard to pin down, but assuming something like an older ST4000NM0125 that's 6.52W Idle / 7.74W average
Add in the Power requirements for the LSI SAS 9207-8i and that's another 9.8W (Worst case 16.0W according to spec sheet)

So that's ~87 Watts when in operation ( ~75 Watts idle)

A Modern WD Red Pro SATA (e.g. WD141KFGX 14TB) is 3.0W Idle / 6.2W Average.

4 of those = 24.8W Average and no separate HBA needed.


The energy saving from switching from 10 drives+HBA to 4 higher capacity SATA drives is £150/year

There isn't much of an alternative - if you need the storage space you need the storage space.

Switching to Unraid rather than ZFS and actually spinning the drives you have down would save more money (but again also has a purchase cost - of an Unraid license as well)

Thanks for the info its got some nice detail.

Those WD drives for 10TB cost around £400 each. (£1600 for same capacity)

When you look at those prices to power usage wise it's meaningless it would take over a decade to equal out.

I have no issue with using something else over ZFS for a long time I was using Windows Server and even OMV.

My main issue is the other parts exclude the hdd side of things.

Someone else gets it


How convenient that you forgot to mention the free expander, just as you chose to compare your used drives to new ones, inconvenient as it adds yet more power/cooling load

The last 10 x 10TB order I did of used drives cost me £433 delivered, with warranty, in fact I don't think I ever paid more than £6.50/TB on any 10-14TB purchase, I did splash out on the 16TB's going all the way to £8.12/TB, but I needed them for a ZFS VDEV. Even at £65/10TB, that's 40TB for £260, or £150 using your claimed £110 value on your other drives. Using your power numbers, that's 20w vs 50w, if you're going ZFS and spinning them 24/7, that's just over £63/yr savings based on 24p/Kw... which puts break even in year 3 (more likely year 2 factoring in your SAS expander's power use and the additional cooling of 10 drives vs 4). I run quite a bit of enterprise kit at home, and honestly, the most efficient builds are generally using a consumer grade PC case with fewer higher density drives as opposed to lots of lower density drives. You also enjoy access to much more efficient PSU's, the Corsair RM series for example, just the fan on my SM PSU's is 4w per PSU if I left both connected, and the load efficiency on an otherwise efficient build is horrific by comparison. Same story with fans,

If you want to run inefficiently, feel free, it's your money, but as someone who has done this for a lot of years and at scale, my way is more efficient and gives you more options, and trust me, you always need more storage than you plan for.

I forgot I had the extender it was not required in microserver so put away.

The cooling requirement is not that bad you make out like the drives and cards are super hot they are not. (These are not the top spec SAS drives they run at SATA level temps on them have always been around 35c max)

Which SATA drives did you get for that price and the place of purchase please? (At that price I wouldn't say no but I was going by widely available price which is £260 or £400 for WD Pro ones 10TB)

Any suggestion on other hardware?

I do have a corsair RM 1000w PSU RMA from Corsair for a faulty 650w they messed up so gave me that.

 

[Armageus]

Those WD drives for 10TB cost around £400 each. (£1600 for same capacity)

Pricing is a bit bonkers at the minute but looking around a competitor has 16TB WD Red Pro @ £445.99 so I'd hope that 10TB would be £330 or so. (Although with 16tb you'd only need 3 drives to achieve 32tb usable the same as your 10x4tb)

When you look at those prices to power usage wise it's meaningless it would take over a decade to equal out.

Yes but looking at it the other way - every year you run the old hardware, you are "wasting" £150, and with how energy prices are going, that will only get worse.

I have no issue with using something else over ZFS for a long time I was using Windows Server and even OMV.

TrueNAS (ZFS) or UnRaid are the only two options worth considering.

 

[edGfaCTor]

Pricing is a bit bonkers at the minute but looking around a competitor has 16TB WD Red Pro @ £445.99 so I'd hope that 10TB would be £330 or so. (Although with 16tb you'd only need 3 drives to achieve 32tb usable the same as your 10x4tb)


Yes but looking at it the other way - every year you run the old hardware, you are "wasting" £150, and with how energy prices are going, that will only get worse.


TrueNAS (ZFS) or UnRaid are the only two options worth considering.

The worrying thing about having less drives is redundancy if even one of them fails that is a lot of data loss (So many reports now of these newer HDD not lasting long)

Prices are not great don't really want to spend £1000+ on HDD only and then still got to spend out even more money for server/nas itself.

 

[Frozennova]

The worrying thing about having less drives is redundancy if even one of them fails that is a lot of data loss (So many reports now of these newer HDD not lasting long)

Prices are not great don't really want to spend £1000+ on HDD only and then still got to spend out even more money for server/nas itself.

It’s a lot more data loss, cost and hassle when a second and subsequently third one of the old, used, out of warranty drives fail during a parity rebuild

 

[Avalon]

I forgot I had the extender it was not required in microserver so put away.

The cooling requirement is not that bad you make out like the drives and cards are super hot they are not. (These are not the top spec SAS drives they run at SATA level temps on them have always been around 35c max)

Which SATA drives did you get for that price and the place of purchase please? (At that price I wouldn't say no but I was going by widely available price which is £260 or £400 for WD Pro ones 10TB)

Any suggestion on other hardware?

I do have a corsair RM 1000w PSU RMA from Corsair for a faulty 650w they messed up so gave me that.

With respect, two posts ago I was wrong, and you weren't interested, and you're still saying dumb stuff/making flawed comparisons on used/new kit, so probably best you find your own suppliers and build your own relationships. As to the rest, as stated previously, in the 10TB class, I only bought HGST He drives due to the obscene MTBF numbers compared to 'normal' drives, they also tend to run cooler anecdotally, they also came in both SAS and SATA. Cooling wise my drives are ranging from 23-33c (mechanical) - average 28c - and 25c (NVMe) in a room that's 18c, I spent time optimising airflow/tuning for noise and it's a nice quiet hum, barely audible over my Noctua on my desktop. As to exaggerating cooling requirements, I have run HBA's from pretty much all generations upto the LSI 9400's and even ran the Adaptec gauntlet (don't, one tiny slip after flashing a firmware and not checking the correct options are set on a reboot, and you will have a very bad day). HBA's need airflow, and in the case of the older stuff are much better off with a dedicated fan or ideally an uprated heat sink/fan unless you want to cook a card (not great for long term lifespan). Similar story with expanders and drives, individually they are fine, but put 10 of them in close proximity and 35c becomes 50c if you aren't careful, and that's also not optimum for a long lifespan.

Hardware wise, it depends on what you are planning on doing and your budget. If it's static media, UnRAID will be the obvious choice, and something used and 8th gen (i3 was 4c, i5 6c) would be a great starting point as it's inexpensive and has enough grunt to do most things, with an iGPU that will handle tone mapping and transcoding. Longer term AV1 may become a consideration, so something more modern in terms of generations/iGPU may be a better play if you don't want to touch the board for a decade, but by then high-end ARC stuff will be for nothing anyway, and it's a drop-in replacement for transcoding. IPMI is a bonus, but we live in a world where that can be added to anything now. Ryzen is going to be more powerful, and at idle it's pretty good on power, but do anything and it spikes up, you also have PCIe lanes to consider along with upgrade path, so perhaps that's a trade-off you are willing to make? A Jonsbro N6 and a MATX board would give you 9 LFF bays, the ability to use an ATX PSU and mix/match SATA/SAS. If going UnRAID over TN, then pay attention to the ability of your SAS drives to spin down, if the SAS Spindown plugin doesn't support them, you're SOL, generally that means not Toshiba SAS, but HGST/WD SAS = Good, HP can be a mixed bag, SATA pretty much always works.

The worrying thing about having less drives is redundancy if even one of them fails that is a lot of data loss (So many reports now of these newer HDD not lasting long)

Prices are not great don't really want to spend £1000+ on HDD only and then still got to spend out even more money for server/nas itself.

Wait, you aren't confusing redundancy and backup as being the same thing, are you? UnRAID will take up to two drive failures before data loss on the main pool, assuming you use two parity drives. That's not a replacement for a proper backup strategy. Also, having 10 older drives obviously introduces greater risk of multiple failures.

 

[maj]

Due to issues running NTFS in Linux from when my server was running Windows, I've decided to start again with my hp gen mini 8 however I can now no longer boot to the SSD. I know at one point I had an SD card in there with the boot partition but the instructions I used for that I no longer have and that was removed a longer time ago and it still botted into the OS fine. It does seem possible to boot to the SSD providing you have the bios set correctly and I found these instructions:

You can get it to boot off the optical SATA port-it just requires disabling AHCI and using the "Legacy" mode in the BIOS configuration.

1. Go into the BIOS configuration utility (F9 at the graphical start up screen)
2. Go to "System Options" -> "SATA Controller Options" -> "Embedded SATA Configuration" and toggle it to "Enable SATA Legacy Support"
3. Go back to the main menu and then choose "Boot Controller Order", set Ctlr:1 to "PCI Embedded Intel(R) SATA Controller #2"
4. You can now go back to the main menu again and go to "Standard Boot Order (IPL)" and set IPL:1 to "Hard Drive C: (See Boot Controller Order)

1. 
   
   

But as soon I boot to my linux boot disk the install fails as it doesn't detect the hard drive. Any ideas?

I've disconnected the drives from the caddy so that it doesn't try to install the OS to those but it has made no difference.

I've also noticed that F10 to get into Intelligent Provisioning doesn't work so it dosn't seem very happy in general.

 

[edGfaCTor]

Have you tried logging into to iLo?

Mine boots fine using AHCI SSD in optical bay using internal sata.

It might be worth you removing battery and re installing bios and if there is updates for iLo etc

Are you running any cards in PCIE slot?

 

[OpenToSuggestions]

I am considering selling off my Microserver as I simply don't use it.
It has an E3 1240 V2, 12GB ram and a 1030 in it.

Are they still generally desirable?

 

[Cyber-Mav]

I am considering selling off my Microserver as I simply don't use it.
It has an E3 1240 V2, 12GB ram and a 1030 in it.

Are they still generally desirable?

Still seem to fetch 50 quid on the bay.
I use my gen7 for offline storage. Just power it on send data across to it then power it off.
Easier than reaching for hard drives and connecting them in to the computer

 

[OpenToSuggestions]

Still seem to fetch 50 quid on the bay.
I use my gen7 for offline storage. Just power it on send data across to it then power it off.
Easier than reaching for hard drives and connecting them in to the computer

The whole pc is only 50quid?
I have since done some pr0 Ebay searching and it does seem worth selling still.

 

[edGfaCTor]

The whole pc is only 50quid?
I have since done some pr0 Ebay searching and it does seem worth selling still.

I think they are referring to gen7 ones not gen8 which go for a lot more.

 

[Trig]

Depends on spec, base models would go for ~£100, but with the upgrades you have, you'd maybe be looking at £175-200.
I sold mine for £350 I think it was, but that was a good while ago now and I'd spent silly money on it.

 

[niggyg]

This box won't die. I've just replaced the SSD running WS 2012 and decided to finally give Unraid a go. I do still plan on building a newer socket 1700 NAS, but for now this thing is still doing fine!

Unraid is brilliant!

4 6TB drives and one small cache/boot drive.

I'm running the following Docker containers.

duckdns
So I can update my free duckdns domain and avoid having to pay for a fixed IP. On my previous setup, I wrote a C# console app to do this (https://github.com/nigelg/update-duckdns-ip).

jellyfin
Plex has always been my primary media server, but having updated to a newer version, I've found they have locked out remote streaming without a paid for fix. So Jellyfin to the rescue. The current latest version (10.11.11) kept crashing. After some serious searching, I found that the CPU in the N40L is missing some instructions needed for the version of SQL lite that Jellyfin is using. I downgraded to 10.10.7, and the issue was resolved.

pelagicia
One thing I found lacking with Jellyfin was the web ui, this is a much nicer web ui for Jellyfin.

navidrome
A music player for my stored music, seems ok.

Edit: This seems to work well. I've installed substreamer on my Android phone, and it happily interfaces with Android Auto.

plex
Still running Plex for local playback on the TV.

speedtest-tracker
Runs speed tests at intervals, so builds up a historical picture of your internet speeds.

tautulli
Statistics built on your Plex usage.

nginx-proxy-manager-official
A way of exposing some services without having to open up more ports on your router. It manages SSL creation for you too.