HP gen8 micro server - any good?

mushtafa

mushtafa

mushtafa

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Just seen the gen8 has £80 cash back again. Makes the unit £99!

Are these good? Reliable? Any owners here?

All I want it for, is to back up video/pictures, and access the files on phone, tablet, PC etc. Having external access via the internet would be a nice bonus as well.

I'm hoping to set up, and forget about it.

Any input? Cheers
 
Yes, brilliant. I have one, use it with DSM (synology software installed) its amazing.

Best PC item I've bought in the past 5 years without a shadow of a doubt.
 
How loud are they? (sorry to steal your threads!). I'd have one as a seedbox/movie storage that would always be on... is that sensible? Don't want one if all it does is buzz away!
 
I'm using mine for movie/audio storage and normal data backups, it sits on the floor under my PC desk. It's quiet for me, even when writing to it at 110MB/s.
 
I had the previous version and although it did its job very well it had its shortcomings. Transcoding wasn't very good and unzipping/unraring a big file took ages. Also check this one doenst have any issues with the 7200Rpm drives vibrating.

Also worth noting is that unlike the older version this does not come with any drives or an optical drive. I don't know what you would use but it looks like the facia could be proprietary.
 
ZXSpectrum said:
I had the previous version and although it did its job very well it had its shortcomings. Transcoding wasn't very good and unzipping/unraring a big file took ages. Also check this one doenst have any issues with the 7200Rpm drives vibrating.

Also worth noting is that unlike the older version this does not come with any drives or an optical drive. I don't know what you would use but it looks like the facia could be proprietary.
Click to expand...

Optical is standard slim drive.
 
New question; Since I've been thinking about a NAS/Server, I've been doing a little research on RAID configurations. I thought, for some reason RAID 5 would be the one to choose, but this server doesn't support it. It only does 0, 1, 10. I'm assuming 10 will the better one to choose?
I'm trying to price up drives.
 
I have just bought a Gen8 - I'm running each drive as a separate RAID 0 array, and I'm using Flexraid tRAID for my 4x4Tb volume.
 
mushtafa said:
New question; Since I've been thinking about a NAS/Server, I've been doing a little research on RAID configurations. I thought, for some reason RAID 5 would be the one to choose, but this server doesn't support it. It only does 0, 1, 10. I'm assuming 10 will the better one to choose?
I'm trying to price up drives.
Click to expand...

Yes, Raid 10 is most likely the best option, depending on what you're after.

Raid 0 simply offers striping, but without any mirroring or parity. It gives you maximum storage and, because the data is being read/written across all drives concurrently, better speed than just using a single drive.

Raid 1 offers mirroring but no striping or parity. You lose the speed increase because the Raid controller has to wait for data to be written to all drives, and you need lots of disk space because multiple copies of your data exists, but of course you gain resiliency if any drives fail (as long as at least one remains working). However, if you have a data integrity issue rather than a mechanical failure then the dodgy data is written to all drives.

Raid 10, as mentioned, combines Raid 1 and Raid 0 so you get both mirroring (i.e. Raid 1) for redundancy and striping (i.e. Raid 0) for performance. You still, however, only get half the amount of total storage you buy (2 x 1TB drives in Raid 10, like in Raid 1, will only give you a total of 1TB of storage), and you have to make sure your disks are all the same.

Hope that helps you :)
 
I'm also looking at "Seagate Business Storage 4 Bay NAS Enclosure".

The spec isn't as good, but allows RAID 5 and has longer warranty compared to the HP.

If I go for 2TB drives, RAID 5 will give me 6TB, RAID 10 only 4TB.


ANDARIAL said:
If you really want raid 5 you could always put a raid/sas card in there :)
Click to expand...

I'll have a quick look at expansion cards. Anything in particular I need to pay attention to?
 
Can`t really say but thinking about it if you do go for a card you would have to modify the drive bays to take the cables from the card
Perhaps not worth the trouble
A card is useful if you want to have the OS on a ssd and use all the 4 hdd bays for data storage as you cant boot off the optical sata port with 4 hdds connected
 
Not only that you'd need to purchase SAS drives, which are a little more costlier than SATA. Which is really more suited towards the enterprise level, rather than a home use spec.

Your RAID choice really depends on your usage, remember RAID does not equal backup, so imo unless you have mission critical services that require 100% uptime, RAID1/10 isn't worth the loss of space. You'd do better replicating a drive and keeping it offline.
 
To me, RAID does equal backup. As far as I know, RAID 5 or 10 allows for one HDD to fail, without loss of data. RAID 5 will give me more storage than RAID 10.
 
mushtafa said:
To me, RAID does equal backup. As far as I know, RAID 5 or 10 allows for one HDD to fail, without loss of data. RAID 5 will give me more storage than RAID 10.
Click to expand...

RAID, definitely is not to be considered the same as having a backup.
At best it gives you resilience against hard drive failure.
I doesn't allow you to recover deleted or corrupted files and data.
 
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