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

Little_Crow said:
Yes, the place you install ESXi has nothing to do with how you can setup a RAID array.

You just have to make sure that any RAID card you buy is on the compatibility list on the VMWare website.
Generally, the cheaper RAID cards will only support RAID 0 or 1. For RAID 5 or 6 you'll need a card with Battery Backed Write Cache (BBWC) or Flash Backed Write Cache (FBWC) and these are generally pricier.
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RAID 5 is not worth doing with the large drives we have today. If anything it risks your data.

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/storage/why-raid-5-stops-working-in-2009/162

http://www.smbitjournal.com/2012/12/the-history-of-array-splitting/



RAID 1 for data protection, RAID 10 for data protection and performance.
 
@.temp
Honestly, you shouldn't discount RAID5 on account of a 7 year old article, purporting doom and gloom 5 years ago - that never happened.
If you're discounting it on account of hardware cost then that's completely fair.

Software RAID has been mentioned, and is doable - but I'm not a big fan. The processor in the microserver isn't the speediest, and I don't know that I'd want to be throwing RAID parity calculations it's way as well as everything else.
 
Little_Crow said:
@.temp
Honestly, you shouldn't discount RAID5 on account of a 7 year old article, purporting doom and gloom 5 years ago - that never happened.
If you're discounting it on account of hardware cost then that's completely fair.

Software RAID has been mentioned, and is doable - but I'm not a big fan. The processor in the microserver isn't the speediest, and I don't know that I'd want to be throwing RAID parity calculations it's way as well as everything else.
Click to expand...

Seriously, as an IT consultant I work with storage arrays all the time. I can tell you first hand just how many customers come to me with failed raid 5 arrays asking me to find their documents. It's too risky. The time it takes for the parity bits to rebuild the array is significant and more so as drive size increases. During that time you are a sitting duck for another drive failure and it really does happen. Industry has all but fazed out raid 5 and rightly so. If you are serious about storage raid 10 is where it is at.

For the scale talked about here though I'd go with drivepool and forget about raid altogether.

Ck
 
easyrider said:
stablebit drivepool and scanner
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How does this work in terms of space consumption?

is it just out and out duplication?

I.E if I have 4 x 3TB disks and chuck on 6TB of files, the disks would be full?

I'm seriously considering this so just want to get my facts straight.

Not aimed directly at Easy, so anyone else who has experience of this product is welcome to chuck their penneth in :)
 
[RB];25798686 said:
How does this work in terms of space consumption?

is it just out and out duplication?

I.E if I have 4 x 3TB disks and chuck on 6TB of files, the disks would be full?

I'm seriously considering this so just want to get my facts straight.

Not aimed directly at Easy, so anyone else who has experience of this product is welcome to chuck their penneth in :)
Click to expand...

It basically pools all of the drives into a single storage pool, there is no encryption or file splitting, whole files sit on NTFS drives, so worse can you can pull a drive and still recover data. There is duplication at a share level, you can simple tell a folder that you want it to be duplicated and it makes sure that folder is on more than one drive.
Scanner checks drives and alerts you of impending doom.
 
tbz_ck said:
Seriously, as an IT consultant I work with storage arrays all the time. I can tell you first hand just how many customers come to me with failed raid 5 arrays asking me to find their documents. It's too risky. The time it takes for the parity bits to rebuild the array is significant and more so as drive size increases. During that time you are a sitting duck for another drive failure and it really does happen.
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Understood, and that sounds like people who have relied on RAID as a 'backup', and they deserve everything they get.
Your point was made much better in your post than by that somewhat sensationalist zdnet article, so thanks for clarifying.

For home, and probably to an extent small business, people will want to get the most out of their investment. Losing half their purchased disk space to RAID1 or 10 can be a tough sell, especially as the array grows in size and you have to buy 2 disks whenever you wish to expand. Whereas losing a single disk worth of space seems like a fair compromise.

I can't disagree with any of your points, but 'too risky' is a variable the customer (In this case a dude on the internet we'll never meet, have to support, or be paid by for consultancy) has to define for themselves.
In my case, as an IT professional I understand all the risks inherent and have decided RAID5 is fine for me - it may not be for everyone.
 
[RB];25798686 said:
Not aimed directly at Easy, so anyone else who has experience of this product is welcome to chuck their penneth in :)
Click to expand...

Trig said:
It basically pools all of the drives into a single storage pool, there is no encryption or file splitting, whole files sit on NTFS drives, so worse can you can pull a drive and still recover data. There is duplication at a share level, you can simple tell a folder that you want it to be duplicated and it makes sure that folder is on more than one drive.
Scanner checks drives and alerts you of impending doom.
Click to expand...

And just to beat the unRAID horse with a stick a little more this is essentially the same as what unRAID does as well (with the key differences being that there is still a single parity drive to give 1 drive's worth of redundancy, and the filesystem is not NTFS, meaning in the worse case above you can still recover data off of a surviving drive, but probably not using a Windows machine)
 
Little_Crow said:
Understood, and that sounds like people who have relied on RAID as a 'backup', and they deserve everything they get.
Your point was made much better in your post than by that somewhat sensationalist zdnet article, so thanks for clarifying.

For home, and probably to an extent small business, people will want to get the most out of their investment. Losing half their purchased disk space to RAID1 or 10 can be a tough sell, especially as the array grows in size and you have to buy 2 disks whenever you wish to expand. Whereas losing a single disk worth of space seems like a fair compromise.

I can't disagree with any of your points, but 'too risky' is a variable the customer (In this case a dude on the internet we'll never meet, have to support, or be paid by for consultancy) has to define for themselves.
In my case, as an IT professional I understand all the risks inherent and have decided RAID5 is fine for me - it may not be for everyone.
Click to expand...

Risk is definitely something for the individual to decide. Since what we store on our home network is digital memories of the whole family if I lost that my wife would probably perform a manual vasectomy on me with a blunt pen knife! :D

Therefore what I need is not RAID, but cast iron backup. Therefore belt and braces using local backups and Crashplan online are what I use personally. Incidently this approach works wonderfully with WHS 2011 and a microserver :)

I'd wager that most on here don't actually need RAID, but should think more about how their data gets backed up. As you said RAID DOES NOT EQUAL BACKUP!!!!1111111 :D
 
quick raid question

the 4 hard drive bays in the n54l do they share 1 sata port, if so how are you fixed for a external raid solution.

What raid controllers would you also recommend, as come to Raid controllers I want to avoid the software ones, I want a full redundancy in my server,

cheers
 
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There's a SAS port - which can support 4 SATA devices using a single connector.

There's also a single (ATA only) SATA port which is intended for an optical drive in the top bay. There's modded 3rd party BIOS' available which will unlock AHCI mode on this port if you want to risk it.
 
Just purchased a N54L and was wondering if you can email the cash back form or do you have to send it by post?

Thanks
 
Can anyone recommend some 'must have' software to get the most out of my microserver?

it's running WHS 2011 and I currently have stable bit drive pool but that is it.

Currently using it as a media streamer and file storage.
 
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