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

I'm new here :-) I'm not very technical but a couple of years ago I managed to bluff my way through setting up two microservers as NAS file servers running Open Media Vault. I recently acquired two more N36L boxes (£20 for two! I'm told they work! ;-) Although both the established boxes are running great using RAID 5, I'm still a bit antsy about the fragility of this setup... I's like to back both boxes up to one large one and then back that one up to the cloud using Backblaze. The issue is that Backblaze's basic service won't back up a NAS, only a directly attached drive. (Correct me if I'm wrong...)
Is there any way these boxes can be directly connected to my Mac? Will the eSATA port do it? The cable seems to be hard to come by and pretty expensive. I guess a USB connection is out of the question...?
Any clever ideas for me to try?
 
Armageus said:
You'd think power consumption would be higher, but because faster chips get work done quicker, they return to idle state much sooner. It's also worth bearing in mind that power saving tech is lot worse on older chips (i.e. they don't respond as quickly)


Modern N100 and similar are absolute beasts however in terms of power usage vs performance.


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someone needs to make a custom mobo that would fit inside the gen7 microserver with n100 chip, or even n305. this not possible with the likes of pcbway etc
 
Jonsbo N2/3/4 depending how many bays you need and one of the N305 or even Ryzen Mobile Mitx boards and you’ve got something in the same ballpark or better power consumption, far more powerful CPU and far more modern.

The route I’ve taken to replacing my Gen10 micro server

My N3 and Ryzen 7840HS Mitx board should hopefully be here this week
 
jigger said:
Sure if want to flush a £100k or more down the toilet and end up with a pretty meh 4 bay NAS.
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lol, wouldnt cost 100k, maybe £100 or less even. iv had lots of small boards made by jlcpcb and people make custom boards all the time for arduino / pi projects. maybe a pc mobo is gonna be way too complex to do for diy?
 
Cyber-Mav said:
lol, wouldnt cost 100k, maybe £100 or less even. iv had lots of small boards made by jlcpcb and people make custom boards all the time for arduino / pi projects. maybe a pc mobo is gonna be way too complex to do for diy?
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PC motherboards are like 8-10 layers and have tons of components to support the main silicon and subsystems. I can't imagine being able to design anything that complex without already doing multilayer embedded electronics as a day job.
 
Cyber-Mav said:
lol, wouldnt cost 100k, maybe £100 or less even. iv had lots of small boards made by jlcpcb and people make custom boards all the time for arduino / pi projects. maybe a pc mobo is gonna be way too complex to do for diy?
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£100k wouldn’t be anywhere near enough… lol…
 
LuckyBenski said:
PC motherboards are like 8-10 layers and have tons of components to support the main silicon and subsystems. I can't imagine being able to design anything that complex without already doing multilayer embedded electronics as a day job.
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Wouldn't need to start from scratch, probably rob an existing itx design and mod it, that's how those mobos from china are so cheap.

Edit: think I may have found something that may work. The mobo from one of those mini office pc's. Either a dell micro, hp desktop mini or Lenovo m720q. The latter has a pcie slot so this could be interesting
 
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Cyber-Mav said:
Wouldn't need to start from scratch, probably rob an existing itx design and mod it, that's how those mobos from china are so cheap.

Edit: think I may have found something that may work. The mobo from one of those mini office pc's. Either a dell micro, hp desktop mini or Lenovo m720q. The latter has a pcie slot so this could be interesting
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Keep us posted with any progress on this, I still have my original HP Microserver and it might be fun to bring it up to modern specs!
 
Certainly an interesting route, if you go down the m720q route it opens up many options as the newer models also use the same sized board more or less so upgrade options could be interesting...
 
My N54L is basically dead. It keeps crashing, between a few hours and a day after booting up, and I've gone through the logs and cannot for the life of me work out what the problem is. Plus once it crashes it refuses to boot up unless I leave it overnight. I did want to replace it with a Gen 10 but I'm starting to think I might as well build a custom NAS with a Jonsbo case or similar.
 
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