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

I'm running with 2 x 4GB non-ECC from Crucial without any issues.

Part number was CT51264BA1339 (DDR3 PC3-10600 • CL=9 • Unbuffered • NON-ECC • DDR3-1333 • 1.5V • 512Meg x 64), currently £37.19 each before cashback.
 
Quick question guys.

I've got the supplied 250GB HDD running Windows 7 64bit with 5GB of RAM and 2 x 2TB HDD for data.

Should I be able to have the 250GB running the OS with the other two 2TB drives mirrored?

Should I just need to enable RAID in the bios and hit the setup RAID key on boot to get this working?

Cheers,
Roy
 
RoyMi6 said:
Quick question guys.

I've got the supplied 250GB HDD running Windows 7 64bit with 5GB of RAM and 2 x 2TB HDD for data.

Should I be able to have the 250GB running the OS with the other two 2TB drives mirrored?

Should I just need to enable RAID in the bios and hit the setup RAID key on boot to get this working?

Cheers,
Roy
Click to expand...

Yes, that's about it. When You add the raid after the OS You simply install the raid drivers in windows.
 
JAKUS said:
Yes, that's about it. When You add the raid after the OS You simply install the raid drivers in windows.
Click to expand...

Perfect. Cheers.

Also, I've once setup mirrored RAID in the past but when one disk failed through the BIOS it wasn't particular obvious how I should have restored the array with my new 2nd disk. In the end I never actually did restore it in fear of deleting everything. Every option seemed to warm me that it was going to blank data on both disks.

Am I better just going with a windows software option that makes this kind of thing more transparent or does the on-board fake RAID seem to handle it OK?
 
RoyMi6 said:
Perfect. Cheers.

Also, I've once setup mirrored RAID in the past but when one disk failed through the BIOS it wasn't particular obvious how I should have restored the array with my new 2nd disk. In the end I never actually did restore it in fear of deleting everything. Every option seemed to warm me that it was going to blank data on both disks.

Am I better just going with a windows software option that makes this kind of thing more transparent or does the on-board fake RAID seem to handle it OK?
Click to expand...

Good question, theoretically raid 1 is simply a mirror, so You have 2 identical drives. If one fails the prudent among us would copy off the other good drive data (just in case) and if the controller does something dumb all is not lost ;)

I have little experience with many "on board" semi hardware controllers in raid 1, but I do wonder if it is possible to hang the good drive on another PC and simply copy the data (I know 100% some recovery software can no problem)

I feel software raid 1 may also be useless in this regard. I don't think You actually have a really useful raid setup until raid 5 ;)

Personally I have been testing freeNAS with software raid 1 and I'm 100% NOT going to use it, high overheads and slower.

Bottom line for Me is there is no other option for the valuable pictures and data other than 2 copy's on different drives/devices/locations.
and for general data that your happier to have backed up on the PC, there is some great free synchronization software.....job done :D
 
JAKUS said:
Bottom line for Me is there is no other option for the valuable pictures and data other than 2 copy's on different drives/devices/locations. and for general data that your happier to have backed up on the PC, there is some great free synchronization software.....job done :D
Click to expand...

I'm with you there. RAID can be a PITA and quite often you don't want the whole HDD backed up. I've got my data backed up on a 2nd PC so that whenever that one gets switched on SyncToy does a quick update of the files I wanted protected.

If you have multiple PCs there's always some space on one of them to do that I find and HDDs are not expensive.
 
RoyMi6 said:
Perfect. Cheers.

Also, I've once setup mirrored RAID in the past but when one disk failed through the BIOS it wasn't particular obvious how I should have restored the array with my new 2nd disk. In the end I never actually did restore it in fear of deleting everything. Every option seemed to warm me that it was going to blank data on both disks.

Am I better just going with a windows software option that makes this kind of thing more transparent or does the on-board fake RAID seem to handle it OK?
Click to expand...

I have a pretty similar set up but rather than mirror my two 2TB drives I have one in an external enclosure that lives in my desk at work, once a week I pop it home to run another backup of my server.

This works for me as the server data is mostly pretty static stuff like Music and Videos. the only dynamic stuff is PC backups but I figure I have two copies of this information in the house (Live copy on the PC and Backup on the server) and in the event of loosing everything in my house I could live without up the last few days stuff as I'd have much more to worry about!
 
Just asking for some advice/sensibility check,

My previous setup was
- 2 x 1Tb in a QNAP NAS (Mainly Movies/Music)
- 1 x 320Gb External HDD to back up critical data
- Really critical data (Photo's and Documents) further backed up in the cloud daily.

Now I've got a microserver due to running out of room for Movies (I decided to start adding my hefty BR collection which started pushing it over the edge)..
My initial thought was carry on as before, superbacked up critical data, not caring about stuff I have original media for, and just thought I'd start out with 2 x 2Tb's and go from there..

However, as I rip more media to the server, the 'cost' of re-ripping is getting higher and higher, so obviously I'm thinking RAID or similar even for my mass storage, this leaves me with 2 small points to mull over
1. Due to cost, I'd really have to stick with Software RAID5
2. I'd ideally need to plan ahead and buy 2 more 2TB drives (giving 4 in total) to maximise my storage potential/cost for the future, as I believe expanding/upgrading software RAID arrays is tricky at best, if not impossible on most...

The other issue is I'm really digging WS2008, the power consumption on idle is < 25W with 3 HDD's in now I've installed all the drivers, and installing/upgrading a few essential apps has been the least problematic so far. so it would be not just software RAID5, but Windows Software RAID5..

I'll continue to double backup critical data, and have the OS on a 250Gb seperate disk.

Any comments on this? I would be happy with 50-60MB/s sequential read/write performance, but I've no idea how bad software RAID is?
 
can't decide whether to swoop for this for an ESXi testbed, seems a bargain for £100 but apparently my Acer Aspire Revo (running my XBMC) can also do x64 VT ESXi......
 
Demon said:
Just asking for some advice/sensibility check,

My previous setup was
- 2 x 1Tb in a QNAP NAS (Mainly Movies/Music)
- 1 x 320Gb External HDD to back up critical data
- Really critical data (Photo's and Documents) further backed up in the cloud daily.

Now I've got a microserver due to running out of room for Movies (I decided to start adding my hefty BR collection which started pushing it over the edge)..
My initial thought was carry on as before, superbacked up critical data, not caring about stuff I have original media for, and just thought I'd start out with 2 x 2Tb's and go from there..

However, as I rip more media to the server, the 'cost' of re-ripping is getting higher and higher, so obviously I'm thinking RAID or similar even for my mass storage, this leaves me with 2 small points to mull over
1. Due to cost, I'd really have to stick with Software RAID5
2. I'd ideally need to plan ahead and buy 2 more 2TB drives (giving 4 in total) to maximise my storage potential/cost for the future, as I believe expanding/upgrading software RAID arrays is tricky at best, if not impossible on most...

The other issue is I'm really digging WS2008, the power consumption on idle is < 25W with 3 HDD's in now I've installed all the drivers, and installing/upgrading a few essential apps has been the least problematic so far. so it would be not just software RAID5, but Windows Software RAID5..

I'll continue to double backup critical data, and have the OS on a 250Gb seperate disk.

Any comments on this? I would be happy with 50-60MB/s sequential read/write performance, but I've no idea how bad software RAID is?
Click to expand...

Well, I am more than impressed with Your 25watt in idle, I've got freeNAS down to 26watts and it's running amd"cool and quiet" and stopping the drives etc..
I can not really see software raid 5 being worth the power and wear and tear on 3 harddrives to store movies, personally out of curiosity what do you rip them with, I've seen quite a few people mention this before but surely at ~20gb a pop I would have thought a little extravagant for something watched once a Year or so ?
Damm, I will have to try server 2008 now :D
 
JAKUS said:
Well, I am more than impressed with Your 25watt in idle, I've got freeNAS down to 26watts and it's running amd"cool and quiet" and stopping the drives etc..
I can not really see software raid 5 being worth the power and wear and tear on 3 harddrives to store movies, personally out of curiosity what do you rip them with, I've seen quite a few people mention this before but surely at ~20gb a pop I would have thought a little extravagant for something watched once a Year or so ?
Damm, I will have to try server 2008 now :D
Click to expand...

Even betterer(tm), when I got home last night, it was on 23.1W (3 HDD's), I had to double check, as that was ludicrous, but after some investigation I am ready to believe.

Using CPU-Z I noticed that when it draws 25W, the CPU is still at 800MHz in WS2008
On FreeNAS it shows the CPU speed as 200/300MHz when it's drawing 26W

I'm thinking that the FreeNAS just modulates the CPU Frequency, but windows is able to do more of the advanced Cool 'N' Quiet things to reduce it even further, and that I guess when I'm not connected via remote desktop and have CPU-Z open, it eventually gets the core speed down to minimum too (200/300Mhz)..

The BR / HD-DVD ripping is mainly done with Make MKV, and I re-encode to give about 12Mbit video rate which seems to be more then good enough for my eyes.. Those I can't do that way I use AnyDVDHD to just rip the feature.evo etc and store natively.
I agree that keeping the collection for films I may only watch once in a blue moon is overkill, but I have more then 1 HD Media streamer around the house and these don't have any BR/HD-DVD Drive.. In fact the BR/HD-DVD drive (GGW-H20L LG) is a weak point, if that breaks, I may struggle to get any HD-DVD Drive, so I might try and slowly replace what I can with BR, just I bought 50 HD-DVD's at £2 each..
 
Methanoid said:
Which BIOS is best now then? This or Official HP?

Plus which port would be faster to connect to? I want a notebook drive on one port and a Removable drive bay on another (plus the 4 bays for my 2Tb drives).

Any ideas?
Click to expand...

No, It was a hack bios that I believe did not work. Personally I put the latest HP bios on but I see no changes.

The 4 bay ports (backplane) are controllable as AHCI/RAID etc the loose port and eSATA are shared and use IDE compatible mode.
You don't really have a choice where to connect that notebook drive :)
 
Demon said:
Even betterer(tm), when I got home last night, it was on 23.1W (3 HDD's), I had to double check, as that was ludicrous, but after some investigation I am ready to believe.

Using CPU-Z I noticed that when it draws 25W, the CPU is still at 800MHz in WS2008
On FreeNAS it shows the CPU speed as 200/300MHz when it's drawing 26W

I'm thinking that the FreeNAS just modulates the CPU Frequency, but windows is able to do more of the advanced Cool 'N' Quiet things to reduce it even further, and that I guess when I'm not connected via remote desktop and have CPU-Z open, it eventually gets the core speed down to minimum too (200/300Mhz)..

The BR / HD-DVD ripping is mainly done with Make MKV, and I re-encode to give about 12Mbit video rate which seems to be more then good enough for my eyes.. Those I can't do that way I use AnyDVDHD to just rip the feature.evo etc and store natively.
I agree that keeping the collection for films I may only watch once in a blue moon is overkill, but I have more then 1 HD Media streamer around the house and these don't have any BR/HD-DVD Drive.. In fact the BR/HD-DVD drive (GGW-H20L LG) is a weak point, if that breaks, I may struggle to get any HD-DVD Drive, so I might try and slowly replace what I can with BR, just I bought 50 HD-DVD's at £2 each..
Click to expand...

Thank's for the ripping info, I did download a 2008 server(120day) trial from MS. I had previously tried WHS but I think it's not good how it controls data (sure it's marvelous for some users) + the advance format HD problem and as far as I can make out it's not to happy to take pre-aligned and formatted drives so You might as well run Win7 or XP !
I will try Server 2008 when i get a chance ;)
I must say this business of just buy a little microserver and some big drives has been a bit of a nightmare, Mainly because I have to be 100% sure I have the right OS and setup as there will be little chance of being able to empty all the drives and start again...This is why a NTFS file solution will not leave my mind ;)
 
Got my Microserver yesterday, well impressed with the build quality, I've got the 250GB mounted in the top connected to the spare SATA port and 4 x 2TB Samsung F4's

Just finished installing Server 2008 r2 standard and fully updated it,

I have tested some read write speeds and i'm getting some strange results, testing from a Windows 7 PC over gigabit connection using a OCZ Solid state so no bottleneck there.

1. With the drives just setup standalone no raid I'm getting around 50-60 mb/sec read and write speed with the Bios set to AHCI

2. Same setup but with Bios set to IDE im getting 80-90 mb/sec

3. If I setup a hardware raid using the onboard controller it doesn't seem to even recognise the drives properly, I can set up the array in the boot section fine but then once into windows it shows the drives as one in disk management but with 2 seperate unallocated volumes one of 2TB and one of 1.6TB and they cannot be joined?.

4.If I setup a software raid in windows with stripped 2x 2TB dynamic drives together I get read/write speeds close to 110mb/sec but that again is on IDE mode in the bios, if I change back to AHCI I drop to 50-60 mb/sec

5. I've tried using spanned dynamic disks aswel with 2x 2TB and get reasonable speeds in IDE mode 80-90mb/sec but dropping to 50-60mb/sec in AHCI mode

I've flashed to the latest HP bios which I though was supposed to fix the issues with the SATA ports.

Any idea's on what else I can try?

I'm happing to run in IDE mode if thats the best speeds i'm going to get
 
mattyj1085 said:
Got my Microserver yesterday, well impressed with the build quality, I've got the 250GB mounted in the top connected to the spare SATA port and 4 x 2TB Samsung F4's

Just finished installing Server 2008 r2 standard and fully updated it,

I have tested some read write speeds and i'm getting some strange results, testing from a Windows 7 PC over gigabit connection using a OCZ Solid state so no bottleneck there.

1. With the drives just setup standalone no raid I'm getting around 50-60 mb/sec read and write speed with the Bios set to AHCI

2. Same setup but with Bios set to IDE im getting 80-90 mb/sec

3. If I setup a hardware raid using the onboard controller it doesn't seem to even recognise the drives properly, I can set up the array in the boot section fine but then once into windows it shows the drives as one in disk management but with 2 seperate unallocated volumes one of 2TB and one of 1.6TB and they cannot be joined?.

4.If I setup a software raid in windows with stripped 2x 2TB dynamic drives together I get read/write speeds close to 110mb/sec but that again is on IDE mode in the bios, if I change back to AHCI I drop to 50-60 mb/sec

5. I've tried using spanned dynamic disks aswel with 2x 2TB and get reasonable speeds in IDE mode 80-90mb/sec but dropping to 50-60mb/sec in AHCI mode

I've flashed to the latest HP bios which I though was supposed to fix the issues with the SATA ports.

Any idea's on what else I can try?

I'm happing to run in IDE mode if thats the best speeds i'm going to get
Click to expand...

there is a option in raid setup "gigabyte" this will match the 2 unequal size drives for the purpose of mirror (raid 1) normally from there on in everything will consider the drives as 1 drive (double check all the options in AMD raid setup)
 
JAKUS said:
there is a option in raid setup "gigabyte" this will match the 2 unequal size drives for the purpose of mirror (raid 1) normally from there on in everything will consider the drives as 1 drive (double check all the options in AMD raid setup)
Click to expand...

The thing is these drives are identical samsung f4 2TB, and I was trying to setup a stripped array raid 0 not a mirror just using 2x2TB drives
 
Why is it that IDE mode often results in better read/write speeds than AHCI, when the hardware is geared towards AHCI usage.
I too and using SSD with ACHI and am getting lower speeds than IDE mode.
 
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