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

Amp34 said:
So a few questions... I've been looking at sorting out a home network recently and as this has suddenly become cheap again I think its probably time I jumped at the chance...

I'm looking to use the N54L as a storage device connected to several machines via wifi (no hard connections at the moment), a couple of PCs and a MacBook (so time machine capacity-possibly streaming to an ipad as well). It'll be used to store videos and backup a few hundred GB of photos, with say 10GB added at a time in future. Is this likely to be a better option than a dedicated NAS like the QNap or synology, just as easy to set up?

Ideally I'd like to be able to access it from anywhere via the net, I assume this is pretty easy to do, dependent on software? With regards to the video capability I'd like to be able to stream and view them as network folders, similarly with photo, although I'm guessing opening 20MB RAWS will probably be slow and depend more on the connection rather than the server.

Finally I'm guessing WHA will be the easiest to set up and use for the above? Will I be able to easily set it up to access from the Internet? I'm guessing any OS option will allow me to download via torrent?

Totally finally setup wise I'll probably go for a 120GB system HDD and then a 2TB HDD and a 1TB HDD I have at the moment, with more storage added at a later date, that'll be easy to do with sata cables? There appears to be discussion about upgrading the ram to 8GB, what's the need for that?

Yep, a bit all over the place but I have done some research but not a huge amount of specifics! Thinking I may grab one and then read up the formalities at a later date!
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While not as plug and play as a NAS if you install a full operating system but if you install something like Freenas as mentioned above which is best installed on a USB thumbdrive you will have almost the plug and play functionality of a NAS. The NAS comes with 2GB of RAM which is a bit on the low side so the machine does benefit from 3-4GB of RAM.
 
Both FreeNAS and WHS appear to be good enough for my simple needs, what interests me about WHS is drive extender, just being able to leave it to do its thing and have redundancy with ease. Does freeNAS have that option without going into more restrictive RAID configs?
 
Amp34 said:
Both FreeNAS and WHS appear to be good enough for my simple needs, what interests me about WHS is drive extender, just being able to leave it to do its thing and have redundancy with ease. Does freeNAS have that option without going into more restrictive RAID configs?
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You can do similar.

If you are filling the array you can offline and replace each drive in the array to something larger and let it rebuild and it will extend the array. Although from what I can see as I've never used WHS the array capacity isn't restricted by the capacity of the smallest drive.
 
Funnily enough this is something I was thinking about myself... I heard about "Stablebit Drivepool" which I believe is only for WHS, but I like the idea. As far as I can understand it's like a weird type of psuedo-RAID where an application monitors your folders and just ensures that certain flagged folders or files always exist on 2 physical drives at once.

If you don't have tons of data that you want that extra protection for then a system like that could give you a lot more value on the storage space you purchased. But I won't use WHS so I've been looking for a Linux alternative to Drivepool but there doesn't seem to be one. Which got me thinking... would it be completely idiotic to try and script this yourself? A fairly simple bash or python script could be made which would monitor a list of files/folders and ensure they exist on two drives (or more) at all times... To be honest I'm surprised no-one else has already done this
 
Drivepool should work on most recent version of Windows, not just WHS.

Storage Spaces in W8/Server 2012 is another alternative if you have the OS already :)
 
cokecan said:
Drivepool should work on most recent version of Windows, not just WHS.

Storage Spaces in W8/Server 2012 is another alternative if you have the OS already :)
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Apologies if I wasn't clear in my other post :p... I'm looking for a way to emulate the functionality of Drivepool in a linux OS, which I haven't been able to find an off-the-shelf solution for so far

Back to thinking about this fan... It seems that the "Scythe Mini Kaze" is reported to be pretty quiet, but is also listed as having "3-pin and 2-pin connectors". Does anyone know if that means it could be directly swapped for the PSU fan in the microserver and powered from the 2-pin header inside the PSU (rather than using a Molex 40mm fan)?

Or how about this... could you use a 4-pin splitter to power both the case fan and the PSU fan from the header which is normally used for the case fan? I'm just trying to work out what the different possibilities might be :rolleyes:
 
Setting mine up after work and training tonight :D

How does one go about running FreeNAS from a USB stick? Is it simple enough?
 
Gents,

Probably being stupid. Is it possible to have OpenMediaServer/FreeNAS running as a VM, but seeing the same physical drive as a torrentbox VM I'll be running AND the base OS?

Cheers.
 
uncle_rufus said:
Apologies if I wasn't clear in my other post :p... I'm looking for a way to emulate the functionality of Drivepool in a linux OS, which I haven't been able to find an off-the-shelf solution for so far

Back to thinking about this fan... It seems that the "Scythe Mini Kaze" is reported to be pretty quiet, but is also listed as having "3-pin and 2-pin connectors". Does anyone know if that means it could be directly swapped for the PSU fan in the microserver and powered from the 2-pin header inside the PSU (rather than using a Molex 40mm fan)?

Or how about this... could you use a 4-pin splitter to power both the case fan and the PSU fan from the header which is normally used for the case fan? I'm just trying to work out what the different possibilities might be :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

Rsync will do exactly what you're looking for
 
.temp said:
Setting mine up after work and training tonight :D

How does one go about running FreeNAS from a USB stick? Is it simple enough?
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Couldn't be simpler... image the stick (note you have to use Win32DiskImager rather than creating a bootable usb from the image like you do with some Linux distros), plug it in, wait quite a while while it installs and you're good :D

Frozennova said:
Rsync will do exactly what you're looking for
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Yep, familiar with rsync, so it sounds like my idea isn't too crazy - I guess I'd just setup a cron script which uses rsync to back up certain files/directories from one drive to another (or if I want to be really fancy I can also have it monitor the number of drives which it can connect to and properly ensure that there are always 2 physical copies of any flagged locations)... Now I just need to decide if I'd rather use a RAIDZ array under FreeNAS, or roll my own solution as described on an install of Ubuntu Server or similar... Hmmm
 
uncle_rufus said:
Couldn't be simpler... image the stick (note you have to use Win32DiskImager rather than creating a bootable usb from the image like you do with some Linux distros), plug it in, wait quite a while while it installs and you're good :D



Yep, familiar with rsync, so it sounds like my idea isn't too crazy - I guess I'd just setup a cron script which uses rsync to back up certain files/directories from one drive to another (or if I want to be really fancy I can also have it monitor the number of drives which it can connect to and properly ensure that there are always 2 physical copies of any flagged locations)... Now I just need to decide if I'd rather use a RAIDZ array under FreeNAS, or roll my own solution as described on an install of Ubuntu Server or similar... Hmmm
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Or you could Use a combination of both, Rsync from a RAIDZ array to a seperate drive or even mirror for backup
 
Frozennova said:
Or you could Use a combination of both, Rsync from a RAIDZ array to a seperate drive or even mirror for backup
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True, although my my thinking was more that by doing rsync to multiple drives in a non-RAID array I'd be increasing the amount of data I could store... e.g:

If I've got 4x3Tb drives I could create a RAID5/RAIDZ1 with one parity drive giving me ~9Tb of usable space overall... But if in reality I only have maybe 1Tb of data I consider to be important enough to require any level of protection for drive failure I could duplicate just that 1Tb across 2 drives with rsync, and I'd then effectively have more like ~11Tb of usable space for less important files (edit: well, actually ~10Tb for less important files plus 1Tb for my important files) - do you see what I mean? (Or am I being dumb) :p
 
uncle_rufus said:
Couldn't be simpler... image the stick (note you have to use Win32DiskImager rather than creating a bootable usb from the image like you do with some Linux distros), plug it in, wait quite a while while it installs and you're good :D
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thanks man :)


basically I want to install it TO a USB that will be on the internal USB of my N54L. So do I need to use 2 USB sticks to achieve this? 1 packed with the install image, another blank one inside the box to have FreeNAS installed onto?
 
I already have the NL36 but couldnt help myself to upgrade to the NL54 for essentially £80, less if i sell the 36

Any one have any experience moving WHS 2011?

I have things running sweet but my plan is to take an image of my NL36 (stock 25ogb drive) and load it onto a 120gb SSD for the NL54, this will allow me an extra HDD with the NL54 after the BIOS hack. I may purchase another license for this or i may just call MS if prompted and say I had a HW failure

Alternately I could go for Freenas or something else but there is a learning curve there and i have Sab, Sickbeard, torrent, Subsonic and Drivebender all setup and working well with WHS. I see little gain or functionality in freenas
 
.temp said:
thanks man :)


basically I want to install it TO a USB that will be on the internal USB of my N54L. So do I need to use 2 USB sticks to achieve this? 1 packed with the install image, another blank one inside the box to have FreeNAS installed onto?
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I've got a feeling that the FreeNAS USB image actually expects itself to be put onto a USB which it will then use to boot from in the future (from memory)...

At any rate, most Linux based installs from a USB stick in my experience are perfectly happy to use the same USB stick to install onto (when they get to the point where you have to specify where to install the OS the USB you just booted from is one of the options you can select)

edit: p.s. it's also recommended to try and go for at least a half-decent USB stick if you intend to use it for your OS (rather than some crappy no-name brand stick), just to make sure its nice and reliable and won't die after a bit of intense use (of course different OS will have varying levels of harsh-ness in terms of read/write to the stick itself, but still better safe than sorry!)
 
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uncle_rufus said:
I've got a feeling that the FreeNAS USB image actually expects itself to be put onto a USB which it will then use to boot from in the future (from memory)...

At any rate, most Linux based installs from a USB stick in my experience are perfectly happy to use the same USB stick to install onto (when they get to the point where you have to specify where to install the OS the USB you just booted from is one of the options you can select)

edit: p.s. it's also recommended to try and go for at least a half-decent USB stick if you intend to use it for your OS (rather than some crappy no-name brand stick), just to make sure its nice and reliable and won't die after a bit of intense use (of course different OS will have varying levels of harsh-ness in terms of read/write to the stick itself, but still better safe than sorry!)
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Sweet man thanks :)

I've got a brand new 8gb SanDisk for it all so i'm ready to go :D Gonna try when I finish up in the gym
 
.temp said:
thanks man :)


basically I want to install it TO a USB that will be on the internal USB of my N54L. So do I need to use 2 USB sticks to achieve this? 1 packed with the install image, another blank one inside the box to have FreeNAS installed onto?
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Go here: http://www.freenas.org/download-releases.html

Click Disk Image at the bottom - > Download this file FreeNAS-9.1.1-RELEASE-x64.img.xz

Then follow this guide:

http://doc.freenas.org/index.php/Burning_an_IMG_File#Using_7-Zip_and_Win32DiskImager_on_Windows
 
Looks like the deal went overnight so that's me back to waiting for another £80 deal. The other shop is a pain in the behind, doesn't seem to understand the difference between delivery and invoice address when you sign up and makes it impossible to change later... Think I'll wait and see if the deal comes up again...

The big benefit for me with WHS is the ability to stick multiple sized drives in and not have to sorry about the smallest drive being the limit of space. W8 has that ability built in so I'm now wondering if that has the rest of the features (streaming, able to take time machine backups etc).
 
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