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

ChrisD. said:
Why bother using RAID? Just use storage spaces. It will be better unless you upgrade to a mid to high end RAID card.
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Because there's existing data on the drive I'd like to retrieve if possible.

While it's not critical as it's movies and music and can be re-ripped (important photos and docs are backed up) it's a last resort.

Slightly annoying as the only issue I found with updating was regarding the on board nic on older bios version.
 
Trig said:
Another case for Drivepool then, you can put drives into the pool and it doesnt format them...
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Not sure that'll work. The drives are set to raid in the pre boot menu, the disks appear separately in windows disk management but it wants to initialise them.
 
Has the Gen8 been permanently reduced cashback now? Was going to buy one last month at £75 cashback, but now seems £50 everywhere
 
It was £70 last month not £75 ... I know because i picked one up to do some docker stuff last month. IIRC the cashback has varied over time.

Anyway, question, what's the easiest way to get a system (Ubuntu probably) to boot using a system disk in the optical drive bay. I'd prefer to have the SATA controller in ACHI mode if possible, I'll be dropping in 4 storage drives configured as JBOD, the system is a backup server and the storage will not be configured resiliently (it's backing up NASes which are).

From what i've read it would appear that you can either run the disks in RAID mode (each disk as seperate single disk RAID0 arrays) but that can affect disk monitoring or you can use a SDcard/USB stick and install GRUB to that to then boot the SSD directly. Is this the case?
 
memyselfandi said:
It was £70 last month not £75 ... I know because i picked one up to do some docker stuff last month. IIRC the cashback has varied over time.

Anyway, question, what's the easiest way to get a system (Ubuntu probably) to boot using a system disk in the optical drive bay. I'd prefer to have the SATA controller in ACHI mode if possible, I'll be dropping in 4 storage drives configured as JBOD, the system is a backup server and the storage will not be configured resiliently (it's backing up NASes which are).

From what i've read it would appear that you can either run the disks in RAID mode (each disk as seperate single disk RAID0 arrays) but that can affect disk monitoring or you can use a SDcard/USB stick and install GRUB to that to then boot the SSD directly. Is this the case?
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Be careful with which NAS drives you use, some (like the 8TB WD Reds I have) don't get detected in the first slots in AHCI mode.

I've had to switch to RAID mode which is a pain (it's unconfigured, so Ubuntu treats them as AHCI drives). I'm booting from internal usb (has grub *and* /boot on it - this is important, it will switch modes RAID to AHCI during boot without the RAID driver) and running Ubuntu server from a 2.5" 1TB in the 5th port.
 
memyselfandi said:
It was £70 last month not £75 ... I know because i picked one up to do some docker stuff last month. IIRC the cashback has varied over time.

Anyway, question, what's the easiest way to get a system (Ubuntu probably) to boot using a system disk in the optical drive bay. I'd prefer to have the SATA controller in ACHI mode if possible, I'll be dropping in 4 storage drives configured as JBOD, the system is a backup server and the storage will not be configured resiliently (it's backing up NASes which are).

From what i've read it would appear that you can either run the disks in RAID mode (each disk as seperate single disk RAID0 arrays) but that can affect disk monitoring or you can use a SDcard/USB stick and install GRUB to that to then boot the SSD directly. Is this the case?
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Running in AHCI mode will result in higher fan speeds. The only way of getting the lowest fan speed is to use RAID mode as you've described. I boot ESXi off a USB stick and run things as VMs (sitting on an SSD in the CDROM bay) with RDM (Raw Device Mappings) for the drives. This abstraction of the hardware means I could replace the Gen8 with a Gen10 (or any other hardware) and the VMs would happily port across.
 
Hmmm ..... I'm not really noticing a difference in fan speeds between the different modes on my other two Gen8 (one running ESXi off a USB stick and using RAID mode and the other running Ubuntu but from Bay 1 using AHCI mode).

I had considered running ESXi again in the way you are but it seemed overly complicated when all I wanted to run one Ubuntu server.
 
memyselfandi said:
Ones at 6% and the other at 10% ... what I mean is there is no noticeable difference being in the same room as them, i.e. the noise isn't significantly different.
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I can definitely tell the difference... but if you can't then that's great because you get the choice.
 
Hey folks,

I'm looking at upgrading my ancient N40L, its done me proud. I use it as a file and plex server, although it always struggled with transcoding. I'm looking at the Gen 8. What is the best CPU upgrade to go for? Also is it simple enough to install an SSD in the optical slot for the OS? I read that the fan speed issue was fixed with a bios update? Is this the case? Any other issues before I pull the trigger?

Cheers!
 
Just the normal. Drives 1,2 are SATA3, 3,4 are SATA2 so if you want speed you need an HBA.
CPU's any that fit. Had 1230v2 in mine which is way above the temp limitations of the old style heatsinks but never cooked itself even when transcoding and running SCCM with SQL use for that, WSUS and a lab.
 
I'm tempted by one of these to have as an offline backup for my QNAP NAS. What's the largest size drive you can get now that is suitable for software RAID and write once a week to it?
 
FYI
Gen10's have a cash back deal.

So does the ML10 G9 which is slightly larger but much better cashback and options.
 
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