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

Daveangle said:
I have Raid5 on my Gen8 got a second hand P410 (1GB with Battery) from the bay for £45, very solid and does the job great, there are loads of them around as well so finding one should be really easy. It also means I can run my SSD from the second SAS port on the raid controller.
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Good bargain, I'll keep my eye out for a similar deal... I've use the P410 for a lot of systems I've worked with.

Archeum said:
Why have the OS on a separate drive to the RAID drives?

On a different RAID array as part of the same drives, sure.
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Because there is a 5th SATA port on the motherboard and you might as well use it... because you can muck around without risking the integrity of your data.

Because it minimises data access times, drive access times, etc, all reducing load and elongating the life of the drives involved...
 
Had a thought this morning about booting off the internal usb
I am still `playing` with the kit but when I get enough dosh together to put some large drives in I will be using as a NAS ,I think,:D
As it boots off a usb and these have a finite number of read/write cycles is this anything to be concerned about?
 
What O/S is that? It is really only a good option for light operating systems like VMware ESXi. You can set the logs to write to spinning rust so that the USB sees little change.
 
Decided to restore to factory settings after my Plex media server plugin was playing up.. got a weird error after the restore and every option in the web GUI was spitting an error.

So... decided to reboot the server, but then I couldn't even get access via web GUI. Then decided it wasn't worth the effort of fixing a b0rked restore when I could burn a new bootable USB and start from a fresh OS. All went quick on that front, only to realise FreeNAS have changed the way the systems boot from USB. They now require a monitor and keyboard to run an initial config :(

You used to be able to burn the ISO and plug in the USB (providing the BIOS was set to boot from USB), so now I have no server until the morning when I fish the VGA cable out of the loft. Fail.

I swear to god, if I cannot import my volumes/datasets you will see a new rocket launch over South Wales :mad:
 
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What usb flash drive are you people using in your server to run ESXI etc? I just can't seem to purchase a decent drive that works these days.
 
On the Gen7 I use a random one I found in a draw.
On the Gen8 I use the MicroSD slot from an old mobile memory expansion.
 
A Kingston 16GB GT101 and a Sandisk 8GB microSD.

Avoid USB 3.0 drives, I've seen some really weird behaviour when used on a USB 2.0 port for O/S installs.
 
I have never had any luck with Kingston drives. Working one day and useless the next. The drives I purchased 3+ years ago still work today.
 
I've got 2x Kingston USB 2.0 drives. 8GB and 16GB.

FreeNAS recommend a minimum size of 8GB for the latest release. Never had stability issues with the drives tbh. I guess any brand will have its share of horror stories.
 
Tempted with the idea of picking up a HP Gen8 Celeron (before the cash back ends) for server messing about.

Ideally, it would serve as my central media server, file storage, IIS server, My SQL and MS SQL Server and DNS server running the latest Windows Server.

Would it be a nice microserver to start playing with?
 
It is a very nice server to play with. All the usual enterprise features in a small very well made package. It can do all the things you want. You need to et a move on though, you have to have it delivered and invoiced before the end of the month for the current offer.
 
I guess its max peak draw is 150w from the wall with say 4x 3TB drives installed?

Just trying to work out what the 24h running cost would be with the drives maxed out.

Update: now ordered, will cost £120 after cash back. Seems cheap for a play server, and slightly upgradable too, with Xeon and 16gb Ram.
 
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150W is the PSU rating. You would have to be going some to reach that.

With a quad core Xeon, 16 GB RAM and two HDDs it draws 42.7W. With the standard CPU is it 35.8W.

These are not my readings, but match my setup and so I researched them prior to upgrading the CPU.

A typical HDD alone draws 6 - 9W.
 
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Mine arrived today. What a great looking little package. Built like a tank

What would you people recommend for an OS:

I want to run PLEX, Squeeze-server, torrents and have Raid redundancy. Ideally i want to start with the drives I have and incrementally swap them out for bigger drives as finances allow. Raid allows this doesn't it?

I have a 60gb SSD and a PCI dual sata expansion card I can use, or a 16gb USB flash drive.

Also needs to be fairly noob friendly.
 
Scotspaul said:
Ideally i want to start with the drives I have and incrementally swap them out for bigger drives as finances allow. Raid allows this doesn't it?
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Kind of. You can exchange a drive for a larger size but the usable space is always limited to the smallest drive in the set. Once all the drives in the set are the same size you can expand the RAID into the unused space. However you don't want to be doing this without knowing you have a good backup first.

If you just have a simple two disk mirror then you can retain the old small drive as a backup.

For striped scenarios it is probably simpler to create a new RAID and restore the data.
 
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