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

Been thinking of buying Proliant N40L to use as a Home Server, HTPC and general lounge PC to do things like web browsing, watching youtube and maybe some light gaming.

My configuration would be

Latest Ubuntu OS or Windows 7
XBMC for HTPC Duties
8GB Memory
4 x 2TB Hard Drive with Mirroring giving me 4TB storage
Best Nvidia low profile card I can get which I believe is the 520
I'll use the 250GB HD that's included as a boot drive.
Don't want or need an optical drive

I've done allot of reading about these but I can't find any information on running games. probably the most demanding games I would like to run on this are Trackmania (not T2) and Counterstrike Source. Anyone know if the N40L with the upgrades listed above would work? and what kind of performance would I be looking at?

Also would this be easy enough in both Windows and Ubuntu to wake on lan?
 
I'm looking into buying the N40L microserver as a home file server with FreeNAS installed but I could do with some advice on the best HDD configuration to suit my needs. I need 4TB of storage with a mirror. Would it be best to buy 4x2TB and use RAID to split the drives into a 4TB array and another 4TB array that mirrors it or is there a better way of doing it? I haven't really used RAID before so I'm not sure of the best configuration for a good balance of reliability and speed.
 
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pumaz said:
Been thinking of buying Proliant N40L to use as a Home Server, HTPC and general lounge PC to do things like web browsing, watching youtube and maybe some light gaming.

My configuration would be

Latest Ubuntu OS or Windows 7
XBMC for HTPC Duties
8GB Memory
4 x 2TB Hard Drive with Mirroring giving me 4TB storage
Best Nvidia low profile card I can get which I believe is the 520
I'll use the 250GB HD that's included as a boot drive.
Don't want or need an optical drive

I've done allot of reading about these but I can't find any information on running games. probably the most demanding games I would like to run on this are Trackmania (not T2) and Counterstrike Source. Anyone know if the N40L with the upgrades listed above would work? and what kind of performance would I be looking at?

Also would this be easy enough in both Windows and Ubuntu to wake on lan?
Click to expand...

I'd love to now the answer to this as well, currently have a Synology NAS, but think a fully fledged pc behind the tv would be more benefit
 
Izi said:
Did anyone here get a Raid 5 card for this? If so which one?
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I think the HP P410 seems to be te card of choice. But expensive

The P400 is cheaper but uses a different SFF breakout cable so you couldn't use the existing backplane

Can't remember the numbers but its the long thin one rather than the shorter stubby one. Think ones a SFF8084 and the other a SFF8087

Someone on OCAU got an adaptor made up but it wasn't cost effective in small numbers.
 
pumaz said:
Been thinking of buying Proliant N40L to use as a Home Server, HTPC and general lounge PC to do things like web browsing, watching youtube and maybe some light gaming.

My configuration would be

Latest Ubuntu OS or Windows 7
XBMC for HTPC Duties
8GB Memory
4 x 2TB Hard Drive with Mirroring giving me 4TB storage
Best Nvidia low profile card I can get which I believe is the 520
I'll use the 250GB HD that's included as a boot drive.
Don't want or need an optical drive

I've done allot of reading about these but I can't find any information on running games. probably the most demanding games I would like to run on this are Trackmania (not T2) and Counterstrike Source. Anyone know if the N40L with the upgrades listed above would work? and what kind of performance would I be looking at?

Also would this be easy enough in both Windows and Ubuntu to wake on lan?
Click to expand...

The CPU performance is seriously not suitable for gaming, isn't trackmania really old from the PII days? That would be fine I'd imagine as long as it's compatible with whichever OS you're going to run on it but doubt CS Source would work fine.

It's a pretty weak low power CPU so I would keep away from gaming
 
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Does anyone have a step by step guide for setting up Windows Home Server 2011?

I want to be able to use it to supply access to the media and files for all windows laptops I have, my android tablet, my boxee box and the android tv box.....

Main thing is the dlna support for those devices.....

Thanks.....
 
pumaz said:
Been thinking of buying Proliant N40L to use as a Home Server, HTPC and general lounge PC to do things like web browsing, watching youtube and maybe some light gaming.

My configuration would be

Latest Ubuntu OS or Windows 7
XBMC for HTPC Duties
8GB Memory
4 x 2TB Hard Drive with Mirroring giving me 4TB storage
Best Nvidia low profile card I can get which I believe is the 520
I'll use the 250GB HD that's included as a boot drive.
Don't want or need an optical drive

I've done allot of reading about these but I can't find any information on running games. probably the most demanding games I would like to run on this are Trackmania (not T2) and Counterstrike Source. Anyone know if the N40L with the upgrades listed above would work? and what kind of performance would I be looking at?

Also would this be easy enough in both Windows and Ubuntu to wake on lan?
Click to expand...

The most honest answer is in the name "Microserver"

a lot of forum users are running it for all sorts of claimed uses outside of the design envelope but at the end of the day it's designation is still "microserver"

Mines doing a damn fine job as a fileserver and streaming duties etc... thanks very much :)

Personally, if I want to run multiple VM's at the same time and game etc .. I use one of better suited stand alone rigs at my disposal :)

Just look at the specs and work out for yourself if you could get all the those applications working at the same time with the CPU/RAM resources available?
 
Hey guys. My server has just arrived.

Is anyone here using the CD sata slot as their primary windows OS disk with the 4 other HDD slots just for data?

EDIT: this is what I ended up doing in case anyone else was thinking of doing the same.
 
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Harpss1ngh said:
That's a really good add-in, recommended. Works well on my Sony!
Click to expand...

Has anyone tried this and got it working?

Set it up on the server. Added my music and video folders.

On to my laptop, open Windows Media player. Servio is listed on the left but no content shows. Any ideas?
 
I got Serviio working lastnight....

All I did was manually start the service from the startup menu and launch the console.... From the console added my F drive and checked all the options for what type of files they were..... I have also put my server on a static IP address on the network. I think there was a scan media now option so that serviio scans the hard drive, I enabled metadata too for the ps3.

Downstairs I got boxee box and the ps3 connected to serviio and they both saw the files no problems.....

Not tried it with the laptop yet but won't get a chance till next week as very busy now.....
 
Has anyone got a decent solution for downloding meta data, photos etc.. for Media Files?

I have tried media companion but this doesn't do it automatically, and I have got a few problems with it, as for some files it download an image of a film called Play, others it doesn't. My folder structure is

D:\Music\*Film Name*\Play.*

It is a bit strange that for some files it downloads the Film Name from the folder name (the wayc I have set it up to do), and otehrs from the file name.

Any suggestions would be good. :)
 
Ember is not too bad, but depends on what your streaming to, I used ot use Ember but went to the IMDB scraper built into XBMC

Kimbie
 
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