HP N36L Microserver - £100

[Tobeman]

Quite the following these little devices have!

Well, I've finally bit the bullet. Having just put an order through Scan for a new desktop, thought I may as well go the whole hog and get one of these as a storage / media serving device.

I've ordered 4x 2TB Hitachi Desktar 5K3000 for these so far. My intention is to stick Windows Home Server on it, and for it to feed the Popcorn Hour currently in residence under the TV with media as well as act as "Document & Settings" for both my new Windows 7 desktop and my girlfriends laptop (to be used away from the network too), and probably act as SABnzbd usenet client too.

I have zilch, none, nadda experience of WHS, RAID, or "intermediate" networking such as this. Aside from beefing it up to say, 4gb RAM, is there anything else I need? I'd like to stick to having the 4x 2GB drives as storage and so I've seen a lot of people using the optical bay for an additional drive (after flashing the BIOS) with a cheap small SSD - is that a matter of just buying an additional bay converter to install? Reading around, it seems RAID5 is ideal too... do I need a RAID card to do that, I assume that's not provided onboard.

Yours

N36L noob

[Edit: I keep reading that WHS2011 needs 160gb free space - is that on the install drive (in my case, an SSD, so I'd have to get at least a 160gb? hmmm... perhaps time to look at an 'green' laptop drive for this task), or installed locally (so I would be fine with 4x2gb) - ta!]

[Splash]

WHS requires a minimum of 160Gb to install to, so you'd definitely need a minimum of that. You could flash the BIOS to the latest version and use the 250Gib disk that comes with it sat in the ODD bay for the OS and stick 4x2TB disks in the caddy. RAID5 would need to be done in software, or your'd need a seperate hardware addin card.

Alternatively there's also an eSATA port, you could potentially install the OS to an external disk, but I'm not 100% certain that it supports booting from eSATA. I could check this out over the weekend if you like?

[Tobeman]

Splash, superstar.

Don't worry about testing the eSATA. I probably wouldn't use it, as I'm after something thats a neat and tidy solution. Thanks for the offer, though.

Good idea re: the supplied drive. I wanted it to be as "green" as possible, but the cost savings on not having to buy a 160gb+ SSD far outweigh the lower power consumption of a SSD I'm sure.

Any RAID card suggestions? I have no experience in this field either

[watercooled]

Depending on what you'll be doing you might not need one - WHS just takes all the drives in to one pool and does duplication across them at the application level. Also, Linux software RAID is good but probably won't be as fast as a hardware RAID card on a low power CPU like this.

[b0redom]

If you want a 'green' solution, why aren't you looking at the WD or Samsung Green drives? Also take a look at FreeNAS/Openfiler before stumping up the cash for WHS. Might save yourself a few quid!

[jim]

Depending on what you'll be doing you might not need one - WHS just takes all the drives in to one pool and does duplication across them at the application level. Also, Linux software RAID is good but probably won't be as fast as a hardware RAID card on a low power CPU like this.

He's talking about WHS 2011, so I don't think any of that's true.

[Splash]

Splash, superstar.

Don't worry about testing the eSATA. I probably wouldn't use it, as I'm after something thats a neat and tidy solution. Thanks for the offer, though.

Good idea re: the supplied drive. I wanted it to be as "green" as possible, but the cost savings on not having to buy a 160gb+ SSD far outweigh the lower power consumption of a SSD I'm sure.

Any RAID card suggestions? I have no experience in this field either

The HP P410 seems to be the card most often used in these but again I'd be asking if you really need RAID5. In fact I'd also be asking if you *really* need WHS: I'm running Openfiler to serve up a mix of SMB and iSCSI storage - the former as a backup dump, the latter for VM storage. If you're only using it to serve up media and backups do you *really* need a Windows server? you could configure your Windows clients to backup to a Samba share on the NAS, and also share your media from it. All this can be easily done using Openfiler or FreeNAS installed to a USB in the internal USB port (saving you another SATA port for storage) and you could then arrange your RAID in software without splashing on a seperate RAID card. Sure, performance won't be as high as a hardware card would give you, but if that's all you're using it for then you honestly don't need to worry too much about performance.


(though using a discrete Intel NIC has improved my network transfer speeds significantly)


At the end of the day though it really depends on what you're wanting to use the device for.

[watercooled]

If you want a 'green' solution, why aren't you looking at the WD or Samsung Green drives? Also take a look at FreeNAS/Openfiler before stumping up the cash for WHS. Might save yourself a few quid!

That's a good point - random access time isn't very important on a home file server and even a single green drive should nearly saturate GigE. Also, green drives actually seem cheaper once you get to larger capacities.

He's talking about WHS 2011, so I don't think any of that's true.

I'm not up to date on WHS since it doesn't interest me much. But I was saying about Linux RAID as another option.

[jim]

Fair enough.

I think, given that WHS 2011 would require hardware RAID (no pooling, no duplication, no software RAID that's worth using), the only logical options are probably the original WHS and Openfiler.

[pardal51]

silly Q:

Is the microserver compatible with Sata III drives? From a quick check on specs it looks that I will need to buy Sata II drives. Not sure whether the AMD controller supports Sata III

Which HDD are you guys using????

I am planing to install OF on USB and use it as backup storage + VM datastore.

[Biscuit]

sata III drives should work fine on sata II ports, the standard is backwards compatible.

[jim]

No point buying SATA III drives anyway, they're nearly always more expensive than the SATA II equivalents.

[pardal51]

sata III drives should work fine on sata II ports, the standard is backwards compatible.

thanks biscuit

No point buying SATA III drives anyway, they're nearly always more expensive than the SATA II equivalents.

thanks jim

I just wanted to make sure the AMD controller did not support sata III drives

[Biscuit]

No point buying SATA III drives anyway, they're nearly always more expensive than the SATA II equivalents.

Actually the cheapest 2tb drive on scan atm is a SATA III model!

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2tb-h...32mb-cache-ncq

The cheapest on in the SATA II category is

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2tb-s...cache-89ms-ncq

Both are currently the same price on today only

[jim]

Actually the cheapest 2tb drive on scan atm is a SATA III model!

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2tb-h...32mb-cache-ncq

The cheapest on in the SATA II category is

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/2tb-s...cache-89ms-ncq

Both are currently the same price on today only

Yeah I noticed that a few days ago, hence why I said nearly! Bizarre quirk, not wholly sure why that's the case but there you go

[spoon_]

My cheque turned up on Saturday btw