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

MarkeR said:
The gen8 with the celeron is still an upgrade from what I have just now though?
Click to expand...

Yes its way way faster.

The Dell T20 is a better buy though at the moment. £97 after cashback and comes with a G3220 (3GHz), 4Gb ram, 500gb hard disk, GB lan, 4 SATA, 290W PSU and 3 PCI-e expansion. Only downside is it is in a midi tower.

Cashback runs out today I think.
 
Last edited:
Cheers for that mate

I had £140 worth of vouchers for the online forest shop, picked one up for £170. I suppose I'll get £30/40 for old one and I'll see if I can get cash back for the microserver.

It only runs plex media server with very little transcoding if any needed.

Thanks again for the advice guys.
 
I've just taken delivery of a Gen8 Microserver and I have a load of questions which I'm sure must have been asked before. Is there a FAQ or wiki for it to save me bothering people here? I'm not ploughing through all 330 pages here as I'd die of old age before I'd finished.....
 
That's part of the fun of owning one! There's a good set of links on the HomeServerShow forum.
 
New to the thread and Gen7 owner (N54L) before upgrading to a Gen8 at crimbo. My N54L handled plex/VPN/DNS/NFS/CIFS all perfectly. This was on headless CentOS 6 mindyou, all with 2GB RAM. Only thing I did to it was throw 2x 3TB REDs in it.

Defo hit up HomeServerShow, they have so much info it hurts, and they've figured out the gotchas, like booting from the ODD port on a Gen8 you need a USB or SD to run the boot loader
 
Btw my Gen8 is a KVM host that runs 3 VMs. One for Plex that has the Film drive attached (LVM) and another for downloads and has an nginx proxy on it. Also have one that runs a Samba domain and has DNS for the whole house (and lab). It was all running on 4GB RAM but upgraded to 8GB, although still have 4GB free!

I'd say give Linux a whirl, why people have to have a GUI and windows server to run things I'll never know. And the cost is eyewatering. Whats 2k12 essentails? >£200?

I'm loving the switch to the Gen8, I have my plex shared to 8 people and quite regularly have 2 streams transcoding fine, only at 2Mbps as my upload is only 5. But not missed a beat yet!

@Trig I agree with b0rn2sk8 the T20 is the best deal, the bigger case just didn't suit me however. AFAIK the power draw is roughly the same so no quibbles there. Theres more space for drives too, 6 bays I think.
 
I'm probably going to run either Windows Home Server 2011 as I have a spare copy or NAS4free which I've already played with on another box. Apart from laptops and NAS, this is the first non-homebrew machine I've had for 25 years and it feels very odd......

I've given Linux various whirls over the years and always end up just looking at it and wondering why I'd bothered as it doesn't run what I use. If you cut me open you'll find 'Wintel' all the way through. ;)
 
Last edited:
Drive upgrade/migration query.

I currently have an N54L running WHS2011. The O/S is still installed on the included 250Gb drive and I have 3 (possibly 4) larger drives installed for storage which are pooled via DriveBender.

I ideally would like to replace the 250Gb drive with something larger, thinking maybe migrating the O/S to an SSD which can be stuffed anywhere inside the case and then utilising the drive bay for a larger standard drive.

Anyone able to provide guidance on how best to do this without knackering the O/S and existing drive pool?

Thanks
 
GSXRMovistar said:
Drive upgrade/migration query.

I currently have an N54L running WHS2011. The O/S is still installed on the included 250Gb drive and I have 3 (possibly 4) larger drives installed for storage which are pooled via DriveBender.

I ideally would like to replace the 250Gb drive with something larger, thinking maybe migrating the O/S to an SSD which can be stuffed anywhere inside the case and then utilising the drive bay for a larger standard drive.

Anyone able to provide guidance on how best to do this without knackering the O/S and existing drive pool?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Ah I'm exactly the same situation myself (well I'm using Drivepool rather than DriveBender) so I'll be very interested hearing any answers to this. WHS2011 does the odd thing with the enforced C and D drive on install that I'm not sure what to do with.
 
Captain Fizz said:
Macrium Reflect, and it's free...
Click to expand...

Thanks Captain Fizz, is that just a case of buying a new SSD of at least equal size (250MB in this case) and imaging the old drive to the new? Presumably then just change the BIOS boot order to which ever port the new drive is plugged into?
 
Not 100% but I'm sure there's a BIOS to allow full speed on the internal SATA Port for the optical drive. (Scroll back quite far in thread or google)

Then it's just plug imaged SSD in and should boot.
 
Clone the HDD to the SSD and then plug the SSD in where the HDD was previously connected. No need to change the boot order.

The SSD only needs to be as big as the used space on the HDD, plus however much free space you think you'll need. Macrium will resize the partitions to suit the size of the new drive.
 
Oh dear haven't a clue where my key has gone. Would anybody be interested in selling a spare?

Also. Is it easy to pop an ssd drive in here once I get in... The slow hard drive really drives me mad if I ever have to restart it.
 
hi guys
got a N54L model and updated the Bios using HPs official BIOS update (2013 one)
can install 2012 R2 fine but doing any sort of large download or file transfer crashes the server and it reboots
havent got a monitor attached so never actually see it but experience it while connected via RDP
as a test i created a couple of virtual machines, one 2012 R2 and one 2008 R2
both downloaded the same files, doing the 2012 one and it reboots the host machine
Doing the 2008 completes no problem

this leads me to believe its all to do with these drivers and Bios updates etc
anyone got any ideas or suggestions?
hit google and cant see anyone else reporting the same.....
 
ok just happened on the 2k8 as a host...
looking into the BSOD dump its the nic drivers so updated them to version 16.6.0.4 and so far seems ok......
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom