HP N36L Microserver - £100

[jim]

Try googling "city link worst courier in history" .

And no, I paid full price for next day delivery. On the flipside, it wasn't Crescent's fault as far as I can make out.

[watercooled]

I've actually never had any problems with City Link.

[jim]

I don't bloody believe this.

Somehow, I've configured / and /var/log as RAID 0 arrays rather than RAID 1. Is there any way of fixing it without starting all over again?

I really cannot start again, took me an entire day to get everything sorted.

EDIT: I have accepted the inevitable and reinstalled

[jim]

By the way, I cannot believe how much I've had to use terminal to get openfiler working properly. Going to be a few years before they can legitimately claim it's as good as commercial software I suspect!

[watercooled]

Microserver arrived this morning.

[b0redom]

Hey Splash,
What was the BIOS which was meant to fix the poor ODD performance? I have just installed 041 from HP, but you mention a custom BIOS?

Cheers...

b0redom

[watercooled]

http://lime-technology.com/forum/ind...?topic=8349.15 and scroll down a bit.

[jim]

Hey Splash,
What was the BIOS which was meant to fix the poor ODD performance? I have just installed 041 from HP, but you mention a custom BIOS?

Cheers...

b0redom

If you go to HP

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport...OID=4064#12212

Grab the first BIOS download, take the raw files (don't use the automatic HPQUSB tool), whack them onto a USB stick, then pull the ahci.bat and ahci ROM from the download watercooled linked to, extract them onto the USB as well, then boot off the USB.

Let it do its thing, then once that's finished run ahci.bat.

At least that's what I did, and it works fine now. You get an extra tab on the BIOS for southbridge tweaking.

[b0redom]

Cool. I did that, and turned off IDE Legacy mode. Is that it or do I have to do anything else to get it to run at full speed?

Cheers...

b0redom

[watercooled]

Make sure to disable 'SATA combined mode'.

[b0redom]

Are my sums right?

I'm transfering 22 GB of data (in 5 large files) between my Mac and my FreeNAS server:

22GB is approx 22607 MB
22607MB is approx 180855 MBits

The transfer takes around 8 m 43 seconds = 523 Seconds

So 180855 Mbits / 523 seconds = 345 Mbit/sec or around 1/3 of the theoretical bandwidth for GigE?

[watercooled]

What protocol are you using?

[b0redom]

Smb.

[watercooled]

Maybe it's something to do with the Mac implementation - do you have a Windows system to try with? I get consistently over 80MB/s and frequently over 90MB/s running Debian Squeeze.

[abaxas]

Are my sums right?

I'm transfering 22 GB of data (in 5 large files) between my Mac and my FreeNAS server:

22GB is approx 22607 MB
22607MB is approx 180855 MBits

The transfer takes around 8 m 43 seconds = 523 Seconds

So 180855 Mbits / 523 seconds = 345 Mbit/sec or around 1/3 of the theoretical bandwidth for GigE?

The mac smb client is not the fastest. I'd be happy with that speed.

However it could be the switch inbetween, raid implementaion on the nas, drive speed.

Lots of issues or potential bottlenecks.

But if I was getting that speed, I wouldnt be worried.

[watercooled]

After testing this server I'm left wondering why the Athlon Neo isn't used in more low-power devices such as netbooks. I mean the whole system power usage is slightly higher but that could just be down to the 200w PSU vs the 90w PicoPSU in my Atom system; the Athlon CPU is a great deal faster, even in multithreaded stuff where the Atom has 4 threads to use. I'll try to get around to posting some numbers later.