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

[uncle_rufus]

I've done the 120mm/40mm fan mod. Noticeably quieter which makes me happy as it's sat behind the TV.

I've upgraded to 4gb and everything works hunky-dory under Server 2012. Not really taxed all the hard, but I did have it running an Ubuntu VM as well with no issues.

I'm really tempted to do the mod, as I'm about to buy some other bits and pieces anyway it wouldn't add much to the cost... (I take it this is the same mod as described several pages ago in this thread? - Replace the 120mm filing off the guide-pin on the header, and the 40mm with a fan powered via a molex adapter) What fans did you use?

 

[Conan257]

Used the fans and advice from Madness' post. You'll have to dig it out yourself as I'm at work.

£17 total I think, so not too bad considering I can now leave it on without incurring the wrath of my missus.

 

[uncle_rufus]

Used the fans and advice from Madness' post. You'll have to dig it out yourself as I'm at work.

£17 total I think, so not too bad considering I can now leave it on without incurring the wrath of my missus.

It's okay I'm at work also but I have that post bookmarked at home, just wanted to check.

£17 isn't bad at all alongside all the other stuff I'm going to be getting (probably ~ £150 in total, what's an extra £17 )...

My Microserver technically doesn't have to be quieter as it's not in a bedroom or by the TV, but it is sat on top of a chest of drawers in the same room as my PC... So when I'm sat at my desk it's about a metre behind me at head height Given how quiet my main PC is as well I can definitely hear it, so a little quieter would be nice

 

[Marky]

Hey guys,

Just thought I'd post a link to a question I've just asked in the Windows forum regarding remote access to my Microserver.

If anyone has any opinions/assistance I'd be very grateful

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?p=25114620

 

[uncle_rufus]

Well I put in my order this morning... the bits and pieces for Madness' case and PSU fan replacement mods, plus the 2x2Tb Toshiba drives... But now I have so many decisions to make!!!!

Reading around I'm actually starting to lean towards unRaid... Since I could try out the free version for the meantime and then switch to the paid version in the future if I get on with it... Anyone got any thoughts on it? I did do a forum search but it didn't turn up much

 

[ubern00b]

Well I put in my order this morning... the bits and pieces for Madness' case and PSU fan replacement mods, plus the 2x2Tb Toshiba drives... But now I have so many decisions to make!!!!

Reading around I'm actually starting to lean towards unRaid... Since I could try out the free version for the meantime and then switch to the paid version in the future if I get on with it... Anyone got any thoughts on it? I did do a forum search but it didn't turn up much

unRAID is my chosen flavour of NAS OS. Been running flawlessly for around 3 years now. It's not the quickest unless you use a cache drive (it writes to the cache drive first then to the data/parity drives at a later stage. Writing directly to the array writes to the data and parity drives at the same time resulting in half the throughput as its writing to both drives at the same time) but even then I get around 50mB/s when copying to it. Since its mostly a read device for me (it serves media around my house) the write speeds don't bother me. Half a gig throughput is good enough anyway.

 

[xdcx]

Hey guys,

Just thought I'd post a link to a question I've just asked in the Windows forum regarding remote access to my Microserver.

If anyone has any opinions/assistance I'd be very grateful

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?p=25114620

TeamViewer is my preference. I run the main app on my work laptop and my android phone and then I have the unattended install client on my servers at home plus on my families laptops scattered about the country. One click access to everything and it works very well. Plus you can do file transfers without launching a full GUI session which is handy.

It's free!!

 

[traveyb]

Currently have one running ESXi 5 (8GB RAM), debating if it get another two (1 as another host and the other as a NFS storage box). Just wish I could load it up with 16GB RAM

 

[uncle_rufus]

unRAID is my chosen flavour of NAS OS. Been running flawlessly for around 3 years now. It's not the quickest unless you use a cache drive (it writes to the cache drive first then to the data/parity drives at a later stage. Writing directly to the array writes to the data and parity drives at the same time resulting in half the throughput as its writing to both drives at the same time) but even then I get around 50mB/s when copying to it. Since its mostly a read device for me (it serves media around my house) the write speeds don't bother me. Half a gig throughput is good enough anyway.

Excellent, I thought we'd have a resident expert around here somewhere

I've had a read of their site and I really like the sound of it, but I have a couple of questions you might be able to help with...

1. Am I right that I can initially setup my 2x2Tb drives and then at a later date buy more and add them to the array/pool of drives as needed (with the only caveat being that the parity drive must be at least as large as whatever the largest drive is - so for example if I added a single 3Tb drive my existing 2x2Tb would both become usable space and 2Tb of the 3Tb would become the parity space)?

2. Do you know if the "medium" license gives you any benefits other than increasing the drive limit from 3 to 7?

3. If I like it and buy the license, it talks about it working by using a hash of your USB stick GUID which you place in a config file... I get the idea - this stops you buying one license and abusing it on multiple accounts, sharing it without consent etc... but do you know if there are any options for transferring it to a new stick (or can you apply for a new license without re-paying)? I'm just thinking if the USB stick failed does that mean you've got to shell out for a new license?

That's all for now, cheers, I'll probably think of more though

 

[TheBiznes]

@ Uncle_rufus

Have a look at XPEnology I can assure you it's the perfect compliment for a Microserver. A similar Synology that the software comes from would cost around £1500. Admittedly not all the features are available like 10GB network, but the most important thing is performance and I have found Disk Station Manager very quick and intuitive. You could install it stand alone like others have done, but I would suggest you install esxi and then you can run other VM's like pfsense or untangle or whatever you wish. Gives you flexability and full use of the box.

It can saturate a gb network even from 1 drive OK. More than most Linux OS's can only windows 2008 seems as good. The packages are excellent including TV recording, backup, media servers like Plex. Just too many to list and that without listing the third party apps.

List of the packages available

DSM 4.3 Packages - Synology Inc. Network Attached Storage - NEW NAS Experience

XPEnology NAS • View topic - [SOLVED] Install on vmware ESXI

Synology model that usually has this Disk Station Software installed.

Synology DiskStation DS3612xs review | IT PRO

Easy guide to install in Esxi download pdf file.

http://xpenology.com/forum/download/file.php?id=168

Screenshot of the main browser window.

[URL="

 

[uncle_rufus]

@ Uncle_rufus

Have a look at XPEnology I can assure you it's the perfect compliment for a Microserver.

Thanks for the info... Off the top of your head can you explain whether it covers the following features (which were what I liked about the description of unRaid):

- Ability to add additional drives to a software based array which includes some redundancy without having to rebuild the entire array (this is what has put me off FreeNAS/nas4free/ZFS in general - that plus the memory requirements of ZFS)

- UnRaid apparently keeps all the parity info on one drive and doesn't stripe the data on the other drives - meaning a slight performance hit for reads but only needing to spin up one drive for reads rather than the whole array (helping with power usage/heat and the lifespan of the drives) and only 2 drives for writes (one data one parity)... This also means if 2 drives fail simultaneously you don't lose everything as you would in a normal RAID5/RAIDZ1 setup

Perhaps I should make a thread about this as I don't want to derail the Microserver thread too badly... It's obviously a big decision and I'm still just trying to work out what will be best (I'll most likely try out several setups before I settle on the one I feel the best about).

On the ESXi front I'm still undecided - I think I like the idea of going that route from the perspective of being able to mess about and tinker with things and just because it would be fun, but honestly I don't think I have too much use for other VMs. At one point my (old) server was a combined NAS, Teamspeak 3, Minecraft, webserver and I briefly tried running a TF2 server on it... But all of the above apart from the NAS didn't really see much use (TS3 moved to a cheap amazon host, minecraft + TF2 never ran that well so eventually stopped using it, webserver I messed about with occasionally but didn't have much real use for it)...

So yeah, I guess I can't rule it out completely, but I would need to pick up some extra RAM as I'm still running on the 2Gb it came with and when I tried to install ESXi to try it out it wouldn't let me...

If XPEnology turned out not to be suitable does anyone know if unRaid works well under ESXi if I went that route?

 

[LostCorpse]

N54l for £158.00 good deal do you think?
i cant see the Gen 8 coming down in price soon and i'm not sure the N54l will have another cash back offer any time soon.

 

[ubern00b]

Excellent, I thought we'd have a resident expert around here somewhere

I've had a read of their site and I really like the sound of it, but I have a couple of questions you might be able to help with...

1. Am I right that I can initially setup my 2x2Tb drives and then at a later date buy more and add them to the array/pool of drives as needed (with the only caveat being that the parity drive must be at least as large as whatever the largest drive is - so for example if I added a single 3Tb drive my existing 2x2Tb would both become usable space and 2Tb of the 3Tb would become the parity space)?

2. Do you know if the "medium" license gives you any benefits other than increasing the drive limit from 3 to 7?

3. If I like it and buy the license, it talks about it working by using a hash of your USB stick GUID which you place in a config file... I get the idea - this stops you buying one license and abusing it on multiple accounts, sharing it without consent etc... but do you know if there are any options for transferring it to a new stick (or can you apply for a new license without re-paying)? I'm just thinking if the USB stick failed does that mean you've got to shell out for a new license?

That's all for now, cheers, I'll probably think of more though

1. Correct. You can expand up or out (add larger drives or add more of the same) and the only caveat being the parity drive must be the largest (or of equal size) drive in the array.

2. It allows more drives, it allows the use of a cache drive which I am not sure the free license allows and other than that I don't think it offers anything more.

3. There is no official transferring of licenses allowed however there is an unofficial policy where Tom will use his discretion and allow at least one transfer of the license. This is confirmed in the Wiki and this link.


As for XPEnology I had a good go at it and it was pretty decent. My decision not to go with it was down to the fact that it is a hack and in no way supported. I decided my data, even if it is "throw away" data, was more important than relying on something that may never be updated, could lose my data at any time and for any reason. Just my 2p.

- UnRaid apparently keeps all the parity info on one drive and doesn't stripe the data on the other drives - meaning a slight performance hit for reads but only needing to spin up one drive for reads rather than the whole array (helping with power usage/heat and the lifespan of the drives) and only 2 drives for writes (one data one parity)... This also means if 2 drives fail simultaneously you don't lose everything as you would in a normal RAID5/RAIDZ1 setup

Correct. It doesn't stripe, parity is on a single drive and if you lose 2 drives (say parity and a data drive) you can at least still recover the data from the other drives quite simply.

 

[uncle_rufus]

Thanks very much I think I will give the free version of unraid a try when I get around to setting things up... Hoping to attempt the double fan-replacement mod as well as sticking the new drives in it over the next day or two - fingers crossed I don't break anything!

 

[Deleted member 138126]

N54l for £158.00 good deal do you think?
i cant see the Gen 8 coming down in price soon and i'm not sure the N54l will have another cash back offer any time soon.

Will be very interesting to see if the Gen8 ever gets a cashback as good as the G7s had.

£158 for the N54L isn't bad, considering I bought mine for £85 during the final cashback. Is that including VAT?

 

[LostCorpse]

Will be very interesting to see if the Gen8 ever gets a cashback as good as the G7s had.

£158 for the N54L isn't bad, considering I bought mine for £85 during the final cashback. Is that including VAT?

yer £158 with vat as far as i can see..

 

[doodah]

Still haven't installed the 40mm fan but that's due to time and other problems with the machine. Tried using the onboard NIC and Windows broke; it wouldn't boot and when it eventually did none of the USB ports worked so I couldn't use the keyboard and mouse. I installed Windows again, everything seemed fine, until I tried using the NIC again. Turns out if I enable it in the BIOS it causes the stuck on Windows loading/USB ports not working.

Someone suggested stripping the machine down to see if I can identify the conflict. I need to sit down and fix, tinker, sort various things to do with the machine, network and XBMC. Hopefully on Sunday. On a more positive note, my cheque arrived

 

[uncle_rufus]

Still haven't installed the 40mm fan but that's due to time and other problems with the machine. Tried using the onboard NIC and Windows broke; it wouldn't boot and when it eventually did none of the USB ports worked so I couldn't use the keyboard and mouse. I installed Windows again, everything seemed fine, until I tried using the NIC again. Turns out if I enable it in the BIOS it causes the stuck on Windows loading/USB ports not working.

Someone suggested stripping the machine down to see if I can identify the conflict. I need to sit down and fix, tinker, sort various things to do with the machine, network and XBMC. Hopefully on Sunday. On a more positive note, my cheque arrived

Ah well - I got impatient and ordered the fans, so who knows perhaps I can advise you on how installing them goes if I beat you to it

My cheque arrived as well 1 week earlier than the full 45 days

I'm almost in the opposite position to you actually - server is working okay at the moment, just setup a Gigabit switch for the first time and the network is absolutely flying now... But then I replaced my raspberry pi PSU and it seems to have killed it - So I don't have a media centre to stream anything to at the moment!

 

[ChocolateStarfishRammer]

Hey guys,

Im looking at putting another gigiabit ethernet card in the N54L..

I currently run WHS2012 and get a sustained speed over gigabit of around 100mbps on transfers.

If I were to add another card, and team them up.. Would I notice increased transferred speed from my PC (also with teamed nics).

?

I cant quite figure out if the gigabit switch will limit it...

 

[liamcrane]

Hi guys

Currently running esxi 5.1 and its informed me I only have 60 days left on my current license. I thought it was free and never actually expired? Is there another free alternate?