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

Sh4rkie said:
Question for those in the know, could a HP PCI-E x8 P400 card be installed to upgrade to RAID 5?
Click to expand...

I've had a quick look at mine, and so far as I can tell the SATA backplane in the microserver presents as four ordinary SATA ports, which then join in to an 8470 SAS connector.
I think that if you can figure out how to take the server apart you could fit an 8484 to 4x SATA fanout cable instead, which would work fine with the hp p400.

One thing you'd need is a low profile metal pci backplate, there's enough room for the card and connector, but you'll need a low profile backplate to secure it.

View from above down behind the backplane, it's a bit too tight for me to take out and confirm that the silver/grey cables are SATA, but i'd say its very likely.
http://img23.imageshack.us/img23/5543/sdc111071600x1200.jpg

On the cashback front I'm starting to get a little worried, not heard anything yet (posted claims form off on the 16th). Still, guess they've only had it around 5 working days so far due to Bank holidays and mail delays. Glad the offer has been extended so even if it was lost in the post I can give it another go in a week or so.
 
Last edited:
On the cashback front I'm starting to get a little worried, not heard anything yet (posted claims form off on the 16th). Still, guess they've only had it around 5 working days so far due to Bank holidays and mail delays. Glad the offer has been extended so even if it was lost in the post I can give it another go in a week or so.
Click to expand...

I also posted my claims form back on the 16th, and I had my confirmation email on the 20th. I do however live somewhere that has had virtually no snow.

The extension of the offer will make no difference to machines purchased in December. But as the cut-off date for the December offer is the 4th of February you've still got plenty of time to chase it.
 
Zarf said:
I've had a quick look at mine, and so far as I can tell the SATA backplane in the microserver presents as four ordinary SATA ports, which then join in to an 8470 SAS connector.
I think that if you can figure out how to take the server apart you could fit an 8484 to 4x SATA fanout cable instead, which would work fine with the hp p400.
Click to expand...
Many thanks for that. Is it defo a 8470 connector? The service manual just list's it as a "mini sas connector". Cheers.
 
Has anyone received their rebate cheques yet ?

I know it says 28 days, but i ordered mine pretty much on the 1st December (my rebate will only be £50, but i might let it lay low for a while, and try and wrangle another £100 out of them :)).

I got the email saying they received my claim, just wondering when the cheque might arrive, it said 28 days, and im on the 28th day :p
 
Just installed windows 7 on mine on a 160GB 2.5" Hard drive connected to the spare SATA port on the motherboard.

Ordered a 2TB drive and have the 3 spare slot's to add more when I need them! :D
 
Transfer speeds:
I am running Freenas 0.7.2 rev 5637, with "tuning" selected, Async IO, and "large read/writes" selected. Disks are 2 x 2TB Samsung F4 5400rpm HD204UI. I have not installed a hardware raid card or anything like that. Server has 1GB memory as delivered. FreeNAS runs off a 4GB USB stick internally. FreeNAS buffers are all still at default values. I get about 55MB/s writing to an SMB/cifs share from my windows 7 PC, and about 47MB/s reading a different file back. For these tests I was copying a single large file (DVD ISO image) and reporting what Windows reports in the COPY progress details. Both cores of the CPU are running at about 50% while these copies are happening. I'm planning on retesting in a few days time with an Intel network card and see if that makes a difference.

Note that at times the transfer rate does drop a lot lower, to something in the 10 to 20MB/s range. For me, I realised this was always soon after a reboot. I set up the volumes in FreeNAS with the box ticked to do an fsck after bootup. That takes a long time with 1TB of small files ... like as long as 90 minutes. Any transfer testing done while the fsck was still running was at the slower speed. That suggests that it might not scale that well to lots of users, but that is not a problem here at home where we might get 2 or 3 people accessing at once at a busy time.

My experience is that low transfer speeds are often related to low quality network switches or poor cables. I ended up changing almost a year ago to new cables and replaced the cheap 8 port netgear gigabit switches with the netgear prosafe switches (GS108) and a number of transfer speed issues went away.

For comparison, my old FreeNAS box (an old Pentium 3 3GHz with 512MB memory, 2 x 1TB Samsung F1 disks and an Intel network card) gives me write speeds of 34MB/s and read speeds of 28MB/s.

If anyone else does have the Samsung F4 2TB HD204UI disks, you need to update the firmware, which is really easy. I also updated the BIOS in the HP microserver. Again, really easy to do. Can give links to more details if needed.

Hope this is all helpful to someone!
 
Zarf said:
Yeah, that's correct, had them mixed up in my head :)
Click to expand...
Mine arrived today and i've pulled it apart :D. The backplate to host cables appear to be a "SFF 8087 to 4x 8482 with Power" assembly.

I wonder if it's possible to convertor the SFF 8087 to a SFF 8484 with an adaptor so i could retain the backplate cabling and then connect that to the P400 card.
 
I've had mine just over a week now, is a good little server for home.

Hardware wise, have put in two 4GB Corsair PC3-10666 RAM modules and an IBM ServeRAID M1015 SAS/SATA Controller to give either RAID 0/1/10.

Have ESXi booting from an internal 2GB flash drive serving Win Server 2008 R2 as DC, Exchange 2010 and Askozia PBX.

Very capable and quick for home office.
 
elaps said:
I'm having problems getting wake on LAN to work on mine. I have updated to latest BIOS and checked the settings. I'm used to using WOL and so am convinced it is the server, but not sure if this is an HP firmware issue or a fault on mine. Anyone able to test WOL on theirs?

Many thanks!

By the way ... running FreeNAS (0.7.2 latest) with 2x2TB drives and works well apart from this. BIOS does not have any timed startup or shutdown. Freenas has cron entries you can add, so a timed shutdown is possible from within Freenas. I need the WOL for powering on in a remote location.

Some people may also be interested to know that the onboard NIC does NOT support jumbo frames (anything larger than 1.5k seems to fail). I'm planning on adding an Intel PCI express card to get round that.
Click to expand...

Mine refuses to wake on lan aswell.

Will have a futher play with it and let you know if I find anything interesting.

When I sent the packet the lan light on the front flashes, but the machine doesn't wake up.
 
Guru said:
Mine refuses to wake on lan aswell.

Will have a futher play with it and let you know if I find anything interesting.

When I sent the packet the lan light on the front flashes, but the machine doesn't wake up.
Click to expand...

I've got this working now, you have to go into the advanced properties of the NIC and change the Wake on Lan capabilities to just "Magic Packet" instead of "Both".

This sorted it for me :) Hope this helps!

Being able to turn it on from my iPhone anywhere I am is legendary :D
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom