N54l or home built server

Viberious

Viberious

Viberious

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Didcot, Oxfordshire
Im looking for a server for the home, looking to backup main gaming/htpc computer.

I have 3tb of music/pictures/tv/films for regular backup.

I cant decide to get a microserver or build a home server.

I have a prodigy itx case, 600 watt PSU would need CPU/ITX motherboard/RAM.

What would you recommend.
 
So tempted by the microserver, want something small and compact yet quiet as it will be placed in the hallway with my HH5 router.
 
If you don't need huge cpu power you can't really beat a microserver

It has things like wol that you have to check with when you build your own

Copious amounts of guides

And space for 6 sata drives

4 natively
1 optical/hdd
1 esata that you can wire into the case

Buy a case, board, cpu, ram, for less than a microserver and you are doing well
 
My thoughts would be a low power CPU (S1155 or S1150) depends on what's around. The microserver would be limited to 4/5 drives plus. Don't need optical drive my name pc doesn't have one.
 
Buying a N54L was the easiest decision I've had to make.

Mine was up and running within a couple of hours.
 
The N54L comes without an OS. Ordinarily I'd recommend Windows Home Server 2011, but the usual suspects don't sell it any more. In another thread, I've been advised that a German online retailer sells it.
 
For the money, there is literally no way to build your own for anything remotely close to that budget.
 
Viberious said:
I have 3tb of music/pictures/tv/films for regular backup.
Click to expand...

Buy the N54L and a couple of WD red drives.
Grab an old laptop sata hdd, a 10gb one will do.
Put it all together and sprinkle with a touch of free NAS Operating System.

Xpenology is supposed to be good but I didn't like the feel of it and decided to use OpenMediaVault.

You can stream all your media to where ever you want over SMB/NFS/FTP/DNLA etc

The reason I bought my microserver is to get the stuff off my rig so i can power it down when it's not in use.
I keep all the same stuff on my microserver that you have mentioned.

Seriously, buy it then come back and tell us that you are sorry for being a big girls blouse. :D
 
CaNsA said:
Buy the N54L and a couple of WD red drives.
Grab an old laptop sata hdd, a 10gb one will do.
Put it all together and sprinkle with a touch of free NAS Operating System.

Xpenology is supposed to be good but I didn't like the feel of it and decided to use OpenMediaVault.

You can stream all your media to where ever you want over SMB/NFS/FTP/DNLA etc

The reason I bought my microserver is to get the stuff off my rig so i can power it down when it's not in use.
I keep all the same stuff on my microserver that you have mentioned.

Seriously, buy it then come back and tell us that you are sorry for being a big girls blouse. :D
Click to expand...

This is exactly what I'm looking at doing, So what microserver would you suggest? Budget being around £250
 
For £130, the N54L is an utter bargain (I paid that). For the £99 after cashback you can get it for at the moment with some quick Googling, it doesn't even bear half a second of thought, just pull the trigger!

I've also gone for the popular WD Red route (plus a couple of Greens I had knocking around). I'm running Windows 8.1 with mirrored storage pool.

Previously tried Freenas, didn't like it - average performance and horribly unintuitive.

Lots of good things said about OMV, although I've never used it myself.

Some purchases you look back on and regret, others you have no strong feelings about, and others you know you got right. Forking out £130 for my N54L is one of the ones I got right. Do it!
 
Lots of people with 16gb - it's in the thread somewhere the part number people use.

My poor one has been drafted into work. It's now running 2008 R2 as a terminal server for potentially 60 users after a catastrophic dual meltdown over the weekend of the DL380s that usually run it.

I think it's going to melt :D
 
nutcase_1uk said:
Lots of people with 16gb - it's in the thread somewhere the part number people use.

My poor one has been drafted into work. It's now running 2008 R2 as a terminal server for potentially 60 users after a catastrophic dual meltdown over the weekend of the DL380s that usually run it.

I think it's going to melt :D
Click to expand...

That's insane ! Would it not of been easier to run. Small business server instead of 2008 R2?
I think the max users for SBS is 75 or something.
 
2008 is what we have lying around so for faster install (and I'm not familiar with SBS at all) so I went with that.

Managed to keep it to about 30 users and it's coping surprisingly well:

RDS.png


Fortunately the proper servers are almost ready again.
 
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