HP Microserver Gen 8 Upgrade Questions

Triggahappyhaza · 17 Aug 2019 at 15:04

Hello all,

Long time lurker looking for some opinions on upgrading the HP Microserver Gen8. So I've got a Gen8 which I've upgraded to 8GB RAM and installed an Intel Xeon E3 1220 V2 + Cooler and an SSD running in bay 1 for now. Its only used to run Sonarr, NZBget and Plex on Windows Server 2012 R2. All Plex media is stored on a 4-bay Netgear readynas NV+ V2 I purchased many years ago.

So what I'm looking to do is move the SSD to the ODD bay and upgrade my storage so I can phase out the NAS. What I would like to do is purchase 4 6TB WD Red drives and install them in the server and configure it as RAID 10 to hopefully increase disk performance compared to the NAS as transferring large files is painful right now.

Would the onboard RAID controller be suitable for this, or would getting a PCIE RAID controller be best? I've seen people using either the HP P410 or P222 in previous threads.

Am I correct in thinking to install the SSD in the ODD bay I would only need a Floppy to Sata power cable?

Can anyone recommend a cloud backup system for large amounts of data?

Is there anything else anyone can recommend to increase performance so I can get the most out of the server? I'm hoping to upgrade my movie and TV library to 4K at some point so any advice is much appreciated.

Avalon · 17 Aug 2019 at 16:19

May want to reconsider your storage solution - media is rarely difficult to replace and you will loose a lot in R10 for the sake of protecting it. One of the drive pooping solutions may be a better shout based on what you describe.

Rule 1 of Plex and 4K: Direct play, Do not transcode.

Plex only outputs 1080p or lower H264 when transcoding.
Plex can’t do tone mapping from HDR to SDR without it looking awful (FFMPeg issue).
Native HWDecode (requires PlexPass + iGPU/Nvidia GPU) only works under Windows so decoding H265 is resource hungry.

As much of the 4K content available will come in H265 and HDR, you don’t want to transcode it. If you do, then you want to use a GPU to do the heavy lifting, either an intel iGPU or a Nvidia GPU combined with a PlexPass.

Most people run a dedicated 4K library and use Tautulli to stop it being transcoded (everyone has that one friend who buys a 4K TV and suddenly thinks they can suddenly play a 100Mbit stream over a 20Mbit connection on a crappy client over Wi-fi).

4K direct play requires next to no CPU overhead, just make sure your client can support your media and is appropriately connected.

Quartz · 17 Aug 2019 at 16:32

I have a similar setup: SSD in the ODD bay and 4x 6TB drives in two RAID 1 arrays. Yes, I lose a lot of space but it's my data. I also have a 8 TB HDD as a USB backup.

I originally used the onboard B110 RAID controller and it was fine but I've switched to an add-in RAID controller - one of the ones you mention - and it's rather noisy.

Triggahappyhaza · 17 Aug 2019 at 22:34

Avalon said:
May want to reconsider your storage solution - media is rarely difficult to replace and you will loose a lot in R10 for the sake of protecting it. One of the drive pooping solutions may be a better shout based on what you describe.

Rule 1 of Plex and 4K: Direct play, Do not transcode.

Plex only outputs 1080p or lower H264 when transcoding.

Plex can’t do tone mapping from HDR to SDR without it looking awful (FFMPeg issue).

Native HWDecode (requires PlexPass + iGPU/Nvidia GPU) only works under Windows so decoding H265 is resource hungry.

As much of the 4K content available will come in H265 and HDR, you don’t want to transcode it. If you do, then you want to use a GPU to do the heavy lifting, either an intel iGPU or a Nvidia GPU combined with a PlexPass.

Most people run a dedicated 4K library and use Tautulli to stop it being transcoded (everyone has that one friend who buys a 4K TV and suddenly thinks they can suddenly play a 100Mbit stream over a 20Mbit connection on a crappy client over Wi-fi).

4K direct play requires next to no CPU overhead, just make sure your client can support your media and is appropriately connected.

Would the only advantage of pooling the drives be storage space? What I don't want is if one drive dies my entire library is inaccessible until a new one is put in. I like the idea of having some redundancy to it so that if I do get unlucky I haven't got to download 6+TB of media again. I know media is easily replaced, but it takes a long time to find everything again, organise it etc. What I like about the current Netgear NAS (X-RAID2 which I believe is similar to RAID 5?) is that if one drive fails I can just pop another in and it rebuilds the array.

As for 4K I'm running a full gigabit network so that shouldn't be a problem, I just need to upgrade the system I use to play media on the TV.

Quartz said:
I have a similar setup: SSD in the ODD bay and 4x 6TB drives in two RAID 1 arrays. Yes, I lose a lot of space but it's my data. I also have a 8 TB HDD as a USB backup.

I originally used the onboard B110 RAID controller and it was fine but I've switched to an add-in RAID controller - one of the ones you mention - and it's rather noisy.

Was there a reason you changed to the add-in controller? Would you say it's worth doing or has there been minimal difference between running the B110 and the add-in card?

Quartz · 18 Aug 2019 at 00:39

Triggahappyhaza said:
Was there a reason you changed to the add-in controller?

The add-in card has a battery backup which reduces the risk of data loss and is a hardware RAID controller so there's less overhead.

Avalon · 18 Aug 2019 at 03:21

Triggahappyhaza said:
Would the only advantage of pooling the drives be storage space? What I don't want is if one drive dies my entire library is inaccessible until a new one is put in. I like the idea of having some redundancy to it so that if I do get unlucky I haven't got to download 6+TB of media again. I know media is easily replaced, but it takes a long time to find everything again, organise it etc. What I like about the current Netgear NAS (X-RAID2 which I believe is similar to RAID 5?) is that if one drive fails I can just pop another in and it rebuilds the array.

As for 4K I'm running a full gigabit network so that shouldn't be a problem, I just need to upgrade the system I use to play media on the TV.

Was there a reason you changed to the add-in controller? Would you say it's worth doing or has there been minimal difference between running the B110 and the add-in card?

If you are using Sonarr/Radarr, then you should never need to be involved in finding/organising anything. That’s the whole point.

Pooling drives allows you to mix and match drive sizes based on what represents the best £/TB when you need more space and control how protected that storage pool is. A number of Windows solutions exist, as well as products like unraid which is arguably the go-to for what you describe, but YMMV.

Raid 5 isn’t something you should really be doing with modern large drives.