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

DIABLO said:
Bought 1 of these for the optical drive bay so i can have 6 harddrives enclosed within the system.
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Where does the 6th drive go?
 
kae2 said:
4 Cold Swap bays
1 ODD SATA Port on M'board
1 ESata Port (wire run in from back, custom BIOS).
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Perhaps, if you're stacking SSDs or cool 2.5" HDDs into the ODD bay, you could use a USB hub, ideally finding one which could take 12v power from a Molex connector. Or you could disassemble 8+ 2.5" USB->SATA enclosures - they might all fit.
 
smargh said:
Perhaps, if you're stacking SSDs or cool 2.5" HDDs into the ODD bay, you could use a USB hub, ideally finding one which could take 12v power from a Molex connector. Or you could disassemble 8+ 2.5" USB->SATA enclosures - they might all fit.
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That would be horribly slow.

Just use a SATA pci-e add-in card.
 
Guru said:
I was hoping to use it as a tool to take my SBS 2008 exam. For that I need to be able to run 1x SBS2008 and 1x Vista x64 VM.

I'm currently running 2008 Enterprise, but was considering putting 8GB of ram in and trying to get an SBS2008 with a vista VM in Hyper V.

Cheers,

G


/edit I currently have 4GB of ram and 2008 Enterprise runs everything I want to do in terms of FTP server, media server and teamspeak server. I will not really want to do much more with it than that.

I've partitioned the HDD into 3 chunks, one 148GB and two 75GB, I have enterprise on the 148GB one at the moment.

I tried to install the SBS 2008 as a VM, but it wouldn't install, it just said it needs a minimum of 4GB ram to install, so I thought I'd check if it will run it before I fork out for the 8GB of RAM. My SBS2008 book says that it needs a minimum of 4GB ram and a dual core 1.6 cpu. But I am hoping it might just scrape by considering it's never going to be under load since it's only going to be for my exam and never in production.
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I had so many problems getting it to work as a media centre i ditched it and went with Windows 7.
Had to install BDA drivers etc.
Not sure how different SBS is to R2.
 
i'm thinking about buying one of these instead of a nas and installing whs or windows server 2008 and putting 2x 2tb drives. couple of questions: Can this handle streaming all my movies to a couple of xbmc xboxes a htpc and a wdtv. Also would this be pointless as i currently have a dell poweredge sc1425, but it uses a lot of power to be on 24/7 and is very noisy.
 
chrisvb said:
i'm thinking about buying one of these instead of a nas and installing whs or windows server 2008 and putting 2x 2tb drives. couple of questions: Can this handle streaming all my movies to a couple of xbmc xboxes a htpc and a wdtv. Also would this be pointless as i currently have a dell poweredge sc1425, but it uses a lot of power to be on 24/7 and is very noisy.
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Don't know about your first point, but the microservers are quiet and efficient enough to be left on all the time, so that answers that one!
 
chrisvb said:
i'm thinking about buying one of these instead of a nas and installing whs or windows server 2008 and putting 2x 2tb drives. couple of questions: Can this handle streaming all my movies to a couple of xbmc xboxes a htpc and a wdtv. Also would this be pointless as i currently have a dell poweredge sc1425, but it uses a lot of power to be on 24/7 and is very noisy.
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I'm assuming that you won't be streaming to them at the same time?

Mine quite happily streams and transcodes mkv files to my ps3 and laptop, although the ps3 seemed to struggle with a 17gb one the other night, ended up plugging a laptop in instead and streaming to that. Will try again now I have 8GB of ram in the server and report back.

/edit didn't help with 8GB
 
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So my Ubuntu system kept freezing/being slugglish and killing off sabnzbd/sickbeard randomly. I've turned off granola and the problems seem to have gone away (also, why was granola using 100's of MB of ram??) anyone had any similar issues?
 
kae2 said:
4 Cold Swap bays
1 ODD SATA Port on M'board
1 ESata Port (wire run in from back, custom BIOS).
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Need the custom bios to run this rear? why would they even include it physically then?

Mine works neither with or without the custom firmware - and I do see the 6 ports in the bios :/
 
Anyone know how to enable the 5/6 ahci port as external/removable so it's listed in Safely Remove Hardware in the tray?

I'm using WHS2011 with the modified bios with all 6 ports seen as ahci and a tray in the odd slot.

WHS2011 sees a drive inserted in the tray correctly but I'd like to safely remove the drive using the Safely Remove Hardware tray item.

I've tried adding a registry entry "TreatAsInternalPort" as 0x0 under

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Controller0\Channel<N>

to no avail. It doesn't bring up the Safely Remove Hardware list.
 
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Ozymandias said:
Anyone know how to enable the 5/6 ahci port as external/removable so it's listed in Safely Remove Hardware in the tray?

I'm using WHS2011 with the modified bios with all 6 ports seen as ahci and a tray in the odd slot.

WHS2011 sees a drive inserted in the tray correctly but I'd like to safely remove the drive using the Safely Remove Hardware tray item.

I've tried adding a registry entry "TreatAsInternalPort" as 0x0 under

HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Controller0\Channel<N>

to no avail. It doesn't bring up the Safely Remove Hardware list.
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Use http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm .
 
AbsenceJam said:
Use http://mt-naka.com/hotswap/index_enu.htm .
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Thanks for the pointer.

After further thought I've managed to sort it using "Safely Remove Hardware" without using that utility.

In bios under Chipset / SouthBridge Configuration / SB Sata Configuration

Disable "SATA IDE Combined Mode" - sets port 5 and 6 to use AHCI
Enable "SATA ESP on all PORT" - sets all ports to be external SATA ports

then set ports 1 - 4 to be internal via the registry (unless you want to hot swap all the drives)

reg.exe add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Controller0\Channel0" /f /v TreatAsInternalPort /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001
reg.exe add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Controller0\Channel1" /f /v TreatAsInternalPort /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001
reg.exe add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Controller0\Channel2" /f /v TreatAsInternalPort /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001
reg.exe add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\msahci\Controller0\Channel3" /f /v TreatAsInternalPort /t REG_DWORD /d 0x00000001

Now inserting a drive in ports 5 and 6 cause "Safely Remove Hardware" to be available and it all works :)
 
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People who have added an extra drive in the optical bay, what sort of mounting system have you used ?

I have a few 5.25" to 3.5" brackets but decided to go with something that allows front access to the drive, this isn't working so well...

The one I've picked up doesn't work very well with the mounting screws being in grooves as the bay relies on the side brackets being firmly screwed in for the vibration damping to work, as it is the screws on the left hand side kind of flop out because of the slack allowed by the vibration damping.

Also I was trying to avoid a bay with a 40mm fan in it....
 
Sareth said:
People who have added an extra drive in the optical bay, what sort of mounting system have you used ?
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I used an Icy Box IB-168SK-B. The rubber mounts on it are a bit of a pain the Microserver as they allow the side screws to come out of the rails so I glued a plastic support under each of the four corners to prevent the side angle brackets from coming out of the rails.
 
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