Associate
- Joined
- 27 Feb 2006
- Posts
- 1,750
- Location
- Normanton
yep you do, 35cm data cable and any molex to sata will do
Good Cheap Server - HP Proliant Microserver 4 BAY - OWNERS THREAD
- Thread starter dragonuk
- Start date
yep you do, 35cm data cable and any molex to sata will do
Thanking you.
Associate
- Joined
- 27 Feb 2006
- Posts
- 1,750
- Location
- Normanton
Just setup 3x Samsung 2TB in a software striped raid from Windows Server 2008 and run ATTO benchmark on them straight after formatting
Bios is set to ACHI mode aswel, do these speeds look about right?
Bios is set to ACHI mode aswel, do these speeds look about right?
Associate
- Joined
- 3 Mar 2011
- Posts
- 18
In the process of installing ubuntu server onto a 8gb usb moveable device. Once its done, I may trash it and try Amahi to see if that works also but what I was wondering, if I put in another 8gb moveable device - can I mirror them?
Figured out why I couldn't see my drives in the end, yes I was using those drivers and yes it does report them as unsigned.
The reason I was not able to see my raid arrays in the inital setup utility is because that initial setup runs in 32bit, so I had to load the 32 bit raid driver first and then load the 64bit one afterwards.
That's very useful to know!! I'm glad you got it sorted...
Associate
- Joined
- 3 Mar 2011
- Posts
- 18
Hi
I need some advice.
I need to setup raid on this little beauty but I have mixed discs.
2 x 500gb
2 x 80gb
I am using the above as tests as I have them spare, before I order some 2tb ones.
I have fedora and Amahi installed on a USb key for the OS, and its boots fine.
Anyway, been messing with setting up 2 x raid 1. My issue so far is how do you replace a failed disc. When you dor a CTRL+F and you see a drive has failed (testing with a flunky drive and a spare one of same type), there does not seem to be an option to replace the drive in the array you have setup. You can view it and press continue, and it just goes back to the menu. If I delete the array, it wants to erase the discs.
Any ideas or should I set all discs as ide as AHCI seems to be slow on disc transfer from what I can read on the threads so far, and setup raid in fedora?
My only concern is that if I end up replacing the OS on the USb key, I am trying to find the best option so the data is fine.
Any ideas or advise appreciated.
I need some advice.
I need to setup raid on this little beauty but I have mixed discs.
2 x 500gb
2 x 80gb
I am using the above as tests as I have them spare, before I order some 2tb ones.
I have fedora and Amahi installed on a USb key for the OS, and its boots fine.
Anyway, been messing with setting up 2 x raid 1. My issue so far is how do you replace a failed disc. When you dor a CTRL+F and you see a drive has failed (testing with a flunky drive and a spare one of same type), there does not seem to be an option to replace the drive in the array you have setup. You can view it and press continue, and it just goes back to the menu. If I delete the array, it wants to erase the discs.
Any ideas or should I set all discs as ide as AHCI seems to be slow on disc transfer from what I can read on the threads so far, and setup raid in fedora?
My only concern is that if I end up replacing the OS on the USb key, I am trying to find the best option so the data is fine.
Any ideas or advise appreciated.
Good stuff Demon
Regarding bios, I think it's flaky, during testing I have often had to re-plug usb devices to get them picked up at boot also I'm on the latest HP bios and something really dumb happened and I lost a lot of data on a drive connected to the spare onboard sata port...Laugh was I was using Paragon partition manager on one of the other drives !, dammed if I can work out what happened, but after I quit it was locked into some batch that took 14hours to slowly screw the drive
Gets you every time You think Your smart enough to cut corners
Are you aware of wdidle3 ? If You want to run those WD green drives in the server
I think i might go back to the release bios and see if My strange issues disappear, or should i say "intermittent" strange issues
I Think most of Us have done the same soul searching !, drop the raid and back up a different way. IDE seems best so run that, then it's windows server for me as it uses a lot less power than the Unix solutions I tried
I Think most of Us have done the same soul searching !, drop the raid and back up a different way. IDE seems best so run that, then it's windows server for me as it uses a lot less power than the Unix solutions I tried
Regarding power, I have found that (obviously) installing some apps does make this a pain to keep ultra-low since keeping the OS drive spun down is quite tough when apps are polling/logging etc..
However, It's 26W with the OS drive spun up, and 4 other HDD's idling, this occasionally drops to 22W when the final OS drive spins down..
I'm trying a fresh install on the other box, and will do some Acronis images at various stages of driver/app installs to see if I can get it constantly at 22W when idle..
I know it's a bit OTT to worry about 4W, at least I can have 10 apps running in the background and keep it at that..
I'm just doing a fresh install on the other box to get a load of Acronis backup images at various install states..
Did You see My earlier post regarding widdle3 ?
Soldato
- Joined
- 30 Sep 2006
- Posts
- 5,278
- Location
- Midlands, UK
Ok, just in case anyone's interested.
8gb of ram
4 x 250gb Seagate drives, all as separate and simple volumes
WS2008R2-Enterprise
Hyper-V enabled, and so far have....
Virtual WS2008R2-Std running as WSUS - 2gb on 1 x drive
Virtual WS2008R2-Std running as PrintServer - 2gb on 1 x drive.
Seems to handle 2 vm's so far, although not even fully applied the roles and played with them yet.
Put a 2nd low profile gigabit nic in which will be used for the VMs.
8gb of ram
4 x 250gb Seagate drives, all as separate and simple volumes
WS2008R2-Enterprise
Hyper-V enabled, and so far have....
Virtual WS2008R2-Std running as WSUS - 2gb on 1 x drive
Virtual WS2008R2-Std running as PrintServer - 2gb on 1 x drive.
Seems to handle 2 vm's so far, although not even fully applied the roles and played with them yet.
Put a 2nd low profile gigabit nic in which will be used for the VMs.
Associate
- Joined
- 3 Mar 2011
- Posts
- 18
Any advice on power settings for Windows 2008 server std edition?
So far mine is running at 33w with a single drive. Each drive I add, sees to add 5watts. bios is set to ide mode at the moment.
So far mine is running at 33w with a single drive. Each drive I add, sees to add 5watts. bios is set to ide mode at the moment.
You need to make sure "cool and quiet" is running on the CPU and check th power scheme also set disks to idle after 5 mins and It should drop down to 23W.
I've done some more messing from a fresh install, and now got it pretty much as good as I think it can be from a power/performance perspective and learnt a couple of things, I better try and document it now before I forget!
Quick Conclusion
20W Power consumption on IDLE! (26W even with some apps keeping the OS Drive spun up)
102 MB/s single disk to disk transfer of a 7.7GB in AHCI Mode
SPEC
HP Microserver (DUH!)
2 x 2TB WD20EARS
2 x 1TB WD10EACS
1 x 250GB WD250EAVER (Came with the Server)
BIOS: 17/1/2011 Latest
OS
Windows Server 2008 R2 inc SP1 STANDARD EDITION
DRIVERS
All from, Official HP Download Site
Drivers used
- HP NIC Driver
- AMD Graphics Driver from Here (Linked from HP Driver page)
- AMD RAID Driver from the same place (But only installed when I trialled setting the IDE Mode to RAID, I set the IDE mode back to AHCI and it's stayed that way)
INSTALLING DRIVERS
After the fresh install of the OS completed..
JUST LEAVE THE DEFAULT WINDOWS AHCI DRIVERS, DONT RUN ANY OF THE SETUP FILES FROM THE AMD DRIVER ZIPS!!!
GRAPHICS : I unzipped the downloaded AMD file, then from device manager, I right clicked the 'Standard VGA Display Adapter', clicked 'Update Driver Software', then Clicked the 'Browse my computer'.. pointed it at the root of the unzipped files, and ticked the 'Include Subfolders', and on clicking next it finds and installs the Mobility 4200 driver.. REBOOT!
NETWORK : Simply just launched teh downloaded HP Driver and it updated the generic driver to the HP one
RAID : Setting the IDE Mode to RAID in the bios, booted in to windows, and it found default drivers for the AMD RAID Controller, I unzipped the downloaded files, and again used device manager to right click the AMD RAID Controlled under 'storage controllers', and manually browsed to the files, and it installed the latest version of those (As I said, I only did this to check transfer rates, I then set the IDE Mode back to AHCI in the bios after Id checked it)
Windows Update
Set to check and inform me, I did an update after the driver install, installing all the important and optional updates.
POWER CONFIGURATION
This is the main step to lowering consumption, by default it will be set to the 'balanced' plan, this won't spin the HDD's down.
Here's my settings
You can get to the "Power Options" from Control Panel..
- I "created a power plan" from the left hand menu, I based it on the 'Power Saver' plan, with the following additions
- Turn Disks off after 10 MINS
- Turn Display off after 5 MINS
- ATI Graphics Power Settigs -> ATI Powerplay Settings -> Mazimise Battery Life
LOGGING OUT
- ALWAYS LOG OUT! If using Remote Desktop, when you've finished, don't just quit by clicking the 'x' select START->LOG OUT on the server, it will drop you out of Remote Desktop, and since it's logged out a few desktop services won't be continually running, which I think helps.
OTHER TWEAKS
I Used the new Process Monitor (Free Sysinternals tool from MS) to see what was accessing files etc whilst 'idling', a lot of stuff the server will do in the first 20-30 mins anyway and naturally stop, so it's hard to really distill what is going to be a continual problem and what won't be. The dilema is, running this while logged in at the desktop does cloud matters.
But this is what I did tweak
1. Low Disk Space Checking - Every 10 mins explorer.exe checks the amount of space on each drive, waking things up, even if this might not run while logged out, I just stopped it anyway..
You need to add the following Registry entry (DWORD) to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
NoLowDiskSpaceChecks and set it to '1'
2. The IPHelper service - This is for IPV6 Tunnelling over IPv4, but being on a local network, and the fact it did occasionally keep reading/writing to a file on disk, I just set it to MANUAL and stopped it.
3. In addition to this, I found my Windows 7 pc's always using the Servers IPv6 Address when pinging etc, and did seem to get some odd netbios lookup delays, so I went to the network card properties, and just unticked the TCP/IP IPv6 in the list.. Being an internal network, I don't need IPv6
4. I had some errors in the event viewing regarding EVENT ID 10, I followed this guide, Getting rid of Event ID 10
5. Since I use Remote Desktop, I have unplugged the USB Keyboard/Mouse receiver, it seems to go into low power savings a bit quicker, no idea why..
I'm sure some of the tweaks may be un-neccesary, as I've noted the server will do lots of little background checks on various things for quite a while after boot, but in case anyone wants to mimic my exact setup, I think that was everything I did, and the power/single disk transfer rates show it's quite healthy..
I did an Acronis True Image of the fresh install, and with all the drivers/tweaks, at the moment it's just file serving, I will be installing SABnzbd as a service and I need a uPNP audio server (for my 360 etc) and I'll be trying to get these to not affect things too much..
The server will quite quickly drop to 26-28W in a few mins (After the display turns off, and the main storage HDD's spin down), it can take a while for the OS drive to spin down, once it does, you should be below 25W, and eventually mine has stayed down at just over 20W for periods of time..
I think if you reboot it and just let it boot to the login screen and leave it, it probably has the most chance of staying at it's lowest power, once you've dipped into the desktop and back, it does seem to take forever to get back to a really low power state, although mine will drop to 25.8W in 10mins, which is pretty much good enough..
Quick Conclusion
20W Power consumption on IDLE! (26W even with some apps keeping the OS Drive spun up)
102 MB/s single disk to disk transfer of a 7.7GB in AHCI Mode
SPEC
HP Microserver (DUH!)
2 x 2TB WD20EARS
2 x 1TB WD10EACS
1 x 250GB WD250EAVER (Came with the Server)
BIOS: 17/1/2011 Latest
OS
Windows Server 2008 R2 inc SP1 STANDARD EDITION
DRIVERS
All from, Official HP Download Site
Drivers used
- HP NIC Driver
- AMD Graphics Driver from Here (Linked from HP Driver page)
- AMD RAID Driver from the same place (But only installed when I trialled setting the IDE Mode to RAID, I set the IDE mode back to AHCI and it's stayed that way)
INSTALLING DRIVERS
After the fresh install of the OS completed..
JUST LEAVE THE DEFAULT WINDOWS AHCI DRIVERS, DONT RUN ANY OF THE SETUP FILES FROM THE AMD DRIVER ZIPS!!!
GRAPHICS : I unzipped the downloaded AMD file, then from device manager, I right clicked the 'Standard VGA Display Adapter', clicked 'Update Driver Software', then Clicked the 'Browse my computer'.. pointed it at the root of the unzipped files, and ticked the 'Include Subfolders', and on clicking next it finds and installs the Mobility 4200 driver.. REBOOT!
NETWORK : Simply just launched teh downloaded HP Driver and it updated the generic driver to the HP one
RAID : Setting the IDE Mode to RAID in the bios, booted in to windows, and it found default drivers for the AMD RAID Controller, I unzipped the downloaded files, and again used device manager to right click the AMD RAID Controlled under 'storage controllers', and manually browsed to the files, and it installed the latest version of those (As I said, I only did this to check transfer rates, I then set the IDE Mode back to AHCI in the bios after Id checked it)
Windows Update
Set to check and inform me, I did an update after the driver install, installing all the important and optional updates.
POWER CONFIGURATION
This is the main step to lowering consumption, by default it will be set to the 'balanced' plan, this won't spin the HDD's down.
Here's my settings
You can get to the "Power Options" from Control Panel..
- I "created a power plan" from the left hand menu, I based it on the 'Power Saver' plan, with the following additions
- Turn Disks off after 10 MINS
- Turn Display off after 5 MINS
- ATI Graphics Power Settigs -> ATI Powerplay Settings -> Mazimise Battery Life
LOGGING OUT
- ALWAYS LOG OUT! If using Remote Desktop, when you've finished, don't just quit by clicking the 'x' select START->LOG OUT on the server, it will drop you out of Remote Desktop, and since it's logged out a few desktop services won't be continually running, which I think helps.
OTHER TWEAKS
I Used the new Process Monitor (Free Sysinternals tool from MS) to see what was accessing files etc whilst 'idling', a lot of stuff the server will do in the first 20-30 mins anyway and naturally stop, so it's hard to really distill what is going to be a continual problem and what won't be. The dilema is, running this while logged in at the desktop does cloud matters.
But this is what I did tweak
1. Low Disk Space Checking - Every 10 mins explorer.exe checks the amount of space on each drive, waking things up, even if this might not run while logged out, I just stopped it anyway..
You need to add the following Registry entry (DWORD) to
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Policies\Explorer
NoLowDiskSpaceChecks and set it to '1'
2. The IPHelper service - This is for IPV6 Tunnelling over IPv4, but being on a local network, and the fact it did occasionally keep reading/writing to a file on disk, I just set it to MANUAL and stopped it.
3. In addition to this, I found my Windows 7 pc's always using the Servers IPv6 Address when pinging etc, and did seem to get some odd netbios lookup delays, so I went to the network card properties, and just unticked the TCP/IP IPv6 in the list.. Being an internal network, I don't need IPv6
4. I had some errors in the event viewing regarding EVENT ID 10, I followed this guide, Getting rid of Event ID 10
5. Since I use Remote Desktop, I have unplugged the USB Keyboard/Mouse receiver, it seems to go into low power savings a bit quicker, no idea why..
I'm sure some of the tweaks may be un-neccesary, as I've noted the server will do lots of little background checks on various things for quite a while after boot, but in case anyone wants to mimic my exact setup, I think that was everything I did, and the power/single disk transfer rates show it's quite healthy..
I did an Acronis True Image of the fresh install, and with all the drivers/tweaks, at the moment it's just file serving, I will be installing SABnzbd as a service and I need a uPNP audio server (for my 360 etc) and I'll be trying to get these to not affect things too much..
The server will quite quickly drop to 26-28W in a few mins (After the display turns off, and the main storage HDD's spin down), it can take a while for the OS drive to spin down, once it does, you should be below 25W, and eventually mine has stayed down at just over 20W for periods of time..
I think if you reboot it and just let it boot to the login screen and leave it, it probably has the most chance of staying at it's lowest power, once you've dipped into the desktop and back, it does seem to take forever to get back to a really low power state, although mine will drop to 25.8W in 10mins, which is pretty much good enough..
Last edited:
I did, I'm just not sure I really need it, as my WD20EARS are storage drives, they pretty much spin down and stay spun down when not in use, but I might check the LLC count and if it's showing signs of growing quckly, I'll use that util, so cheers for pointing it out!
It's the fact that increasing the idle time using the App reduces the power saving aspect, but if it is a drive being accessed every few seconds/minutes, then I completely see why it would be a good idea..
Last edited:
Is this good enough for putting a Tv tuner in and recording TV to the attached drives?
Or would it be better getting something abit more powerful to do the job then transfering the files to this.
If i wanted to watch the recorded files on the server id need a proper graphics card?
Has anyone used this to wirelessly connect to their network using a USB dongle?
Or would it be better getting something abit more powerful to do the job then transfering the files to this.
If i wanted to watch the recorded files on the server id need a proper graphics card?
Has anyone used this to wirelessly connect to their network using a USB dongle?
Associate
- Joined
- 3 Mar 2011
- Posts
- 18
Does anyone know, if I choose to use the built in raid 1, how do you replace a faulty disc?
Been testing it, and where I can mimic a failed disc, there does not seem to be the option to replace it on the array you have defined, it just says continue and goes back to the menu
Alternately, what is everyone else using as backups? I have a readynas duo which going shortly so need to make sure datas safe. Before I was having raid1 with a attached usb storage for thinks like pictures and music etc. I am though concerned about the OS disc, especially as its going to have a few apps installed etc and config.
Been testing it, and where I can mimic a failed disc, there does not seem to be the option to replace it on the array you have defined, it just says continue and goes back to the menu
Alternately, what is everyone else using as backups? I have a readynas duo which going shortly so need to make sure datas safe. Before I was having raid1 with a attached usb storage for thinks like pictures and music etc. I am though concerned about the OS disc, especially as its going to have a few apps installed etc and config.
Very nice...as they say a Proper job !
re..wdidle3, The default is to park the heads every 8 secs ! which has got to be excessive. the tool will work on all the connected drives at the same time and I have set 300secs 5 mins but I think I may use 180 sec which is 22x less wear and tear, of course we don't really know in what power states the heads keep parking but at 180 sec will not interfere with My 3mins HD Idle setting as much.