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

Sorry to be a pain as its probably been asked 20 times in the thread but I was looking at getting a NAS setup for home so me and my girlfriend could download and store media on one central place that the PS3 could access without having a computer on.

I was looking at 4x2TB raided so i have 4TB of space and 4TB of backup in a NAS but then ive seen this. What's needed with this server? A raid card and OS, thats it?

Thanks :)
 
tsinc80697 said:
Thanks! What would be a good OS for simplicity of installation? Just need to access over network vis windows laptop and a mac. Only using the server for ps3 streaming and downloading files.
Click to expand...

I personally would use Windows Home Server and it's drive externder feature as losing 4TB of data would really **** me off even if it was'nt crucial stuff as it would take an age to put back on.
 
Zarf said:
I seem to recall that they are 4K sectors, with crappy emulation that kills speeds if it's used. Samsung also emulate 4k but the emulation is much faster. On windows it's not an issue, but it's worth bearing in mind if you are planning a ZFS setup (Due to the emulation, the drives report themselves as being 512k, so the zpools are created with 512k sectors) It can be worked around to force 4k but it's not pretty.

Another issue with them is that they apparently like to park the drive heads after a relatively short period of idle time, which can introduce quite a lot of latency on file accesses (and causes extra wear+tear)

The Hitachi 2TB's are meant to be a good choice.
Click to expand...
Thanks for bringing the 4k sector issue to our attention. Having read up a bit on the matter, I'm inclined to agree that the current workarounds for ZFS aren't pretty, and it doesn't seem the drive manufacturers are going to pull their finger out and release proper firmware any time soon.

I note in the FreeNAS changelog in the latest version 0.7.2 the minor change "Support Advanced Format 4KB sector. (UFS/GPT data partition only)" is listed, and also, rather confusingly, "Add ZFS pool with 4KB sector support"

I'm pretty set on FreeNAS for my setup, but in light of the 4k sector issue, do you reckon I'd be better off with a UFS RAID 5 (software RAID) array with 4x Samsung F4EG drives? I can't justify the extra cost of the Hitachi drives, but then again I don't have any emotional attachment to ZFS yet.

If I go with UFS software RAID am I going to kick myself down the line? :o
 
What provision does this unit have for timed shutdowns? Can you through the bios set it to turn of each night and awake ready for the next day automatically?

Or can you do all that through Freenas? Can't find and answer to this at the moment, well a conclusive one!
 
CraigN said:
Ive got Server 2008 R2 running nicely on mine :D

stuck a blu ray drive in it and encoding on the fly is fine.

Ive got 4gb ram in mine the dual core 1.3 seems to cope ok with the load sat at about 97% load converting to MKV cpu has hit max 42 degrees so far and its been going about 2 hours.
Click to expand...

can you give me the make and model of the blu ray player you installed please?

also, are you encoding the BR directly to HDD drive you installed?
have you installed the encoding software on to the 160gb hdd along with OS?

Just wanted to know because this is what I want to do- have WHS or server 2008 OS, then have DVD Fab on the 160gb server HDD. Then install the blu ray drive so I can rip the BR direct to the server.

I'm just rying to work out if i can rip the BR remotely, as in, install all the software/ OS on the server with monitor connected to it, then once that's done, i can take away the monitor then connect to the server through my PC over the network, then when I put a BR in the server I can see it on my PC so i can open up the correct software and then rip the BR direct to the server- i'm not sure if this is correct. Any advice would be appreciated.
 
thepedster said:
What provision does this unit have for timed shutdowns? Can you through the bios set it to turn of each night and awake ready for the next day automatically?

Or can you do all that through Freenas? Can't find and answer to this at the moment, well a conclusive one!
Click to expand...
FreeNAS has built-in System Shutdown Scheduling.

Not sure what BIOS the microserver uses, but I know similar dedicated NAS systems have scheduled startup and shutdown features in the BIOS, so I'd assume this does too :)
 
Al Vallario said:
Thanks for bringing the 4k sector issue to our attention. Having read up a bit on the matter, I'm inclined to agree that the current workarounds for ZFS aren't pretty, and it doesn't seem the drive manufacturers are going to pull their finger out and release proper firmware any time soon.

I note in the FreeNAS changelog in the latest version 0.7.2 the minor change "Support Advanced Format 4KB sector. (UFS/GPT data partition only)" is listed, and also, rather confusingly, "Add ZFS pool with 4KB sector support"

I'm pretty set on FreeNAS for my setup, but in light of the 4k sector issue, do you reckon I'd be better off with a UFS RAID 5 (software RAID) array with 4x Samsung F4EG drives? I can't justify the extra cost of the Hitachi drives, but then again I don't have any emotional attachment to ZFS yet.

If I go with UFS software RAID am I going to kick myself down the line? :o
Click to expand...

It's not actually too bad, its just a case of knowing that there is an issue and that you can find workarounds in the first place. For me it was simply a case of swapping in a modified zpool binary for creating the pool, making a couple of symlinks for libraries, and then swapping back to the original zpool binary afterwards.

I think on FreeNAS the solution is nicer, there's a executable called 'gnop' that will create extra device entries in /dev with the drives forced to 4k - then you create the zpool using those devices.


I'm pretty happy with performance now, I'm not sure if it was the upgrade to 4GB RAM or some other tweaks that only took effect on reboot, but I'm getting great speed over CIFS/SMB now. Ordered another couple of 2TB Samsung F4EG's so I can have another mirror in the pool for (effectively) RAID10 goodness.
 
Does anyone know if you can use a pcie x1 card in the x16 slot.
I installed a pcie x1 tvcard in the x16 slot and it doesnt seem to get recognised in windows.

Anyone confirmed if a x1 card works in the x16 slot
 
dragonuk said:
Does anyone know if you can use a pcie x1 card in the x16 slot.
I installed a pcie x1 tvcard in the x16 slot and it doesnt seem to get recognised in windows.

Anyone confirmed if a x1 card works in the x16 slot
Click to expand...
It does work. I have a 1x PCI-E network card plugged into a 16x slot.
gRLWK.jpg
As you can see, the plastic notch to the right of the slot secures the contacts in place, making sure they don't stray into other pins.
 
Can you use WHS to run desktop Windows applications? ie could I install jDownloader and log onto the server, queue downloads and let them run. Or would I need something like WIndows XP/7 to do that?
 
Which raid card should I get for this with 4x 2tb drives?

Was hoping to get 6TB space with redundancy, but I dont think the onboard raid will do that.

Thanks,

G
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom