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

crazyg1zm0 said:
The main reason I was doing the full rebuild as I am is just that I threw some old rubbish drives in for the start and this way instead of having 3 drives with some space will have 2 with 4tb.

But I have been looking into other options that will make it easier on adding more drives etc but so far nothing has seemed to allow me to do everything perfectly.

media server
automatic downloads
Clould storage
streaming content to my devices

FreeNas seems to do all of that easily enough for free which is nice
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That's my criteria as well - to be honest I'm probably just going to sling a copy of W7 Pro as I also need to be able to access it with TeamViewer due to having no monitor (will be stored in the loft so no quick access).

I wish there was a free alternative but none of them work with Carbonite for my backup so I'm a bit stuck with a bulky OS.
 
boxman2000 said:
That's my criteria as well - to be honest I'm probably just going to sling a copy of W7 Pro as I also need to be able to access it with TeamViewer due to having no monitor (will be stored in the loft so no quick access).

I wish there was a free alternative but none of them work with Carbonite for my backup so I'm a bit stuck with a bulky OS.
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... Teamviewer alone is a bad reason to go for W7 over one of the Linux distros in my opinion. All of the NAS type ones like Unraid, Freenas etc. provide an entirely webserver based configuration system - so you can access and control everything with a GUI from any other device in your house... and if you need command-line access they'll have some form of SSH/telnet etc. Just a thought

I'm not familiar with Carbonite so can't comment on that aspect - perhaps you really are stuck!
 
My 6450 finally arrived today so tonight going to fit it and get xbmc on the go, I have a bluray drive in my PC I was planning on moving over. How long would a bluray take to rip on a n54l?
 
Assuming you mean straight rip to ISO/MKV then it just depends on the speed of the drive and whether you are ripping the whole disk or just the main feature. as a benchmark , you are looking at between 20-40 minutes with an 8x drive.
 
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james.miller said:
Assuming you mean straight rip to ISO/MKV then it just depends on the speed of the drive and whether you are ripping the whole disk or just the main feature. as a benchmark , you are looking at between 20-40 minutes with an 8x drive.
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Yeah was looking at straight rip cant remember speed of drive but I think its 8x. Not too bad at up to 40mins Been looking at nice one touch solutions (preferably from xbmc) anyone used
AutoRipDVD
http://forum.xbmc.org/showthread.php?tid=105168 before? Probably better posting this in xbmc thread actually
 
I'm having an absolute ball ache with mine :-(
LAN transfer speeds to my ESXI, Ubuntu RAID10 are getting 5MB/s!
Its happening to my Windows 8.1 guest as well, starts off at >50MB then peels down to 5MB/s

No idea where to look.
 
Currently in the process of building my second microserver to provide iscsi storage to my esxi lab. I have fitted a total of 13 disks inside and powered it up and performed initial benchmarks without it blowing up.
Using:
IBM serveraid 8 port SAS controller in 16x pci-e slot
-4x 500GB 3.5" 7200RPM in front bays connected to the motherboard SAS port
-6x hot swap 500GB 2.5" 7200 in 5.25" optical bay, ports 1-6 on IBM SAS controller
-2x 500GB 2.5" 7200RPM on top of optical bay, ports 7+8 on IBM SAS controller
1x 120GB SSD below the optical bay, connected to onboard data port

Running ESXi with the 120GB SSD as a datastore, the 12x 500GB disks have been passed through to a VM as RDM's.

Initial benchmarks showed positive results using Linux CentOS minimal, all 12 disks in one large 5.5TB linux raid 5 volume with SCST as the iscsi target. Local reads around 800MB a second, writes around 450MB a second.

Testing iscsi from a VM running on another ESXi host gave good results, completey maxing out the onboard 1GB nic on sequential reads/writes and decent random performance also. I have a dual port Intel gigabit pcie 2.0 x1 card on order for the x1 slot which will allow much higher total throughput.

Once I am happy with the build I will probably put something which is easier to manage on there such as synology DSM as centos / scst is command line only ( although it is very lightweight and fast). May also bypass ESXi and install on the bare metal, but during testing it makes it easy to try various different OS'.

The choice for 500GB disks was down to the fact that I had most of them already. I wanted to keep all disks the same size, and any larger disks I have are mixed sizes. I may remove two disks and add another two SSD's as cache drives depending on which OS I settle on.
 
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For a software NAS box you really want ZFS. If you want a user friendly interface to it you need FreeNAS.

It's so far ahead of any other software solution. For those that doubt it, I'd suggest a quick google for limitations of software RAID.
 
Been out of the loop a while. Was there any solution to the the N54L's LAN port and W8.1 issue? I remember a BIOS fix been released but it didn't include the increased SSD speeds.
 
I run my N54 with Win 8.1 using the German Bios Buffalo linked to without any problems :), its been out for quite a while now.
 
Hi guys, couple of questions. I've loved my N40L but I'm moving abroad and I need to sell it, I guess some of you have bought yours second hand so can you recommend where's good, MM, eBay? I've also misplaced my keys and I need to give it a clean, would anyone be able to lend me a key so I can get one cut?
 
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