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

steveo said:
cheers for that Phate found them for under £90 with free deliver will get them ordered as soon as i can
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Nice one, I'll be ordering 2 x 2TB ones at the end of the month. One to odd to my 'storage' and another to be a general backup drive for my machines. Fantastic drives :)
 
If you get green drives turn off the auto head parking as it kills drives.

I have sent back about 3 and am currently using 4 of them all of which seem fine now. Due to having the auto head parking turned off.
 
rscosworth said:
HP ProLiant Turion II N40L MicroServer

Currently for sale at £239.98

4.5% cashback through quido
£100 Rebate Till the end of September

=£130.39
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I've just ordered mine and it was listed at £199.97 although I paid via PayPal so there was a £2.99 handling charge. So after rebate I'll pay £101.48
 
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I recently had my N36L blown up by a lightning strike which has cooked the board, so am after a replacement. I'm assuming the Microserver is still the thing to have at that price point?
 
DX Courier's f'ed up my delivery :( should have been sent to Leeds depot but its ended up in Newcastle depot, this has ticked me of as i should have had it today
 
Mine arrived yesterday, two days before the extra RAM which meant ESXi 5 wouldn't install, 4.1 did though so I will upgrade it once it arrives :D

I'm impressed with the way it's built, very neat and well thought out. I spent ages looking for HDD screws and only after did I notice there were loads of spares in the door :o

I've started with installing esxi 4.1 on to a 1gb flash drive (internal) and then installed freenas on to the supplied 250gb disk.

I then allocated 2x1TB drives to freenas and built a raidZ volume (striped) and i've started the process of copying over the media.

Despite only having 1GB allocated i'm getting 41MB/sec (enabled caching in the BIOS) which i'm quite happy with (it's more than i'll get over powerline when I put it in the garage!)

one problem i did have was freenas would freeze when I allocated both cores. Switching back to 1 core works fine, but it's a bit strange.

Next step is to get Serviio on another VM, possibly using linux. I've no idea if the CPU will be good enough to transcode, I suspect not :(

After that I have another 1TB drive to add which will be for backups, that in turn will use Rsync over SSL to another freenas box at my parents. Their backups will come to my freenas, and vice versa so I will have Network raid protection.

I'm such a geek.
 
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The box is great, with a SSD it makes the WOL from hibernation very rapid.

I have it setup with a 6450, 8gb RAM, M4 128gb SSD and Windows 7. XBMC, Sabnzbd and Sick Beard also running.
 
ok doing a shopping list lol

4x 2Tb Samsung SpinPoint F4 EcoGreen HD204UI/ST2000DL004
2x 4Gb Corsair Memory XMS3 8GB DDR3 1333 Mhz CMX8GX3M2A1333C9
WHS2011

putting the OS on a Sata2 SSD do i need to hack or change the Bios to enable the other sata ports?? i have seen it done also but the DVD drive can be replaced with another Hard drive in a cage ???
 
well Dx are the worst company i have had the displeasure of waiting for but the server arrived just now, so i need to getting some drives ordered

img1263hu.jpg


sry for poor pics am in a rush lol
 
Bios mod: http://homeservershow.com/forums/in...for-microserver-n40l-enables-hidden-features/

Basically use HP USB Key Media rompaq to create the bootable USB stick, then replace the bin file with the modded one and rename it to match the original. The HP will do the rest for you when you power on. The link above also has other info on enabling AHCI on all ports (including esata). I'm using eSata as my main OS disk, DVD on the additional internal connector leaving the 4 bays free for storage
 
rafster said:
The box is great, with a SSD it makes the WOL from hibernation very rapid.

I have it setup with a 6450, 8gb RAM, M4 128gb SSD and Windows 7. XBMC, Sabnzbd and Sick Beard also running.
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Very similar to my use! :)

I have a N40L which spent it's early days booting either ESXi for testing from a USB stick, and XBMC Live / Sab / SB / Couchpotato from it's internal 250GB.

I fancied a change (XBMC live was running great though) and Nowadays it's running Windows Server 2008R2 x64 with Hyper-V, and XBMC installed with Sab / SB / Couchpotato and a webcam software so I can see my cats when I LogMeIn to it from work :D

XBMC isn't so nice under Windows but I wanted to give it a stab. next on my to-do list is monkey about with using an external media player, as 1080p doesn't use the GPU ( I have a GT 210 in mine ) natively.
 
Well managed to do the Bios Hack/update have all the new features which i have to say HP should have included, why limit your own machine, got 4x TB WD Greens, WHS 2011 with 8Gb xms3 ram and a couple other bits and pieces, with some luck i should get it all tomorrow.
 
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