HP ProLiant MicroServer

stimpson

There is a fifth sata for the optical drive. It runs at sata I speed though. If you're running the custom firmware you can bump it to sata II speed. I bought this instead: http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B003GS8VA4/ because you may as well go the whole hog. It comes with a half height bracket so fits perfectly. I have a fifth spinner in the optical bay connected to it and I used a 3M sticky pad to mount the SSD to the back of the chassis - there's just enough room.

johnybean

Anyone tried putting on of these in the optical drive bay?

stimpson

johnybean wrote: »

Anyone tried putting on of these in the optical drive bay?

Easier to get one that has a SAS port and get a SAS card - just one cable to connect then. Have you not got enough storage yet?

johnybean

No such thing as enough storage :pac::pac::pac:
I'm just planning ahead at the moment, have 2 drives in the enclosure I ogt off you and 2 more going into it in a couple of weeks, one of which will be a parity drive so not included in overall storage per se. Just looking at options for when I fill the HP, dont know whether to go all out and do a dedicated server build with a large capacity case or to see what more I can squeeze out of the HP. If I could use the 6 in 1 or 4 in 1 enclosure in the ODD bay then that would get me 8 to 12 more TB which would see me out for another while.

stimpson

Have you considered 6TB WD reds?

howamidifferent

johnybean wrote: »

Anyone tried putting on of these in the optical drive bay?

I bought one of these guys 3 years ago and never used it. For sale if your interested. Still in original packing.

EDIT: Also bought and used the 4 in 1 which still has 4 x 500GB drives in it.

ED E

stimpson wrote: »

Have you considered 6TB WD reds?

WD Reds are where its at.

johnybean

Dam you howamidifferent! I would be interested in that (this thread is costing me a fortune!) Just wondering though, how will I power the unit if I have already used the spare power connector when I moved the OS drive to the ODD bay? is there another spare power connector or can that power connector be split?

Stimpson, I have nearly all WD Reds in the server, 6TB drives are a bit outside the budget at the moment, I am getting a 4TB parity drive so that I can swap some of the smaller drives in the server for 4TB drives down the line, this would give me 8 x 4 = 32TB RAW less 8TB parity leaves 22TB. Problem is, I dont really want to swap out 3TB drives for 4TB ones as you are paying €150 ish for 1TB of storage

howamidifferent

johnybean wrote: »

Dam you howamidifferent! I would be interested in that (this thread is costing me a fortune!) Just wondering though, how will I power the unit if I have already used the spare power connector when I moved the OS drive to the ODD bay? is there another spare power connector or can that power connector be split?

I just split the existing connector and it worked just fine for the 4 in 1.
Just discovered it was 4 years ago I got the 6 in 1.

Info on the 6 in 1..
Shipping Method: Priority International Courier
Shipping Preference: Group my items into as few shipments as possible
Subtotal of Items: EUR 51,38
Shipping & Handling: EUR 28,60

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Import Fees Deposit EUR 16,79

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Total for this Order: EUR 96,77


Delivery estimate: May 18, 2011 - May 20, 2011
1 "Thermaltake MAX-1562 Backplane HDD Cage Hot Swap Removable Hard Drive Kits 2.5-Inches SAS/SATA RAID Ready RC1600101A"
Electronics; $70.00
In Stock
Sold by: Amazon Export Sales, Inc.

johnybean

howamidifferent wrote: »

I just split the existing connector and it worked just fine for the 4 in 1.

And how did you connect all of the drives to the motherboard (Sorry for all the questions)

howamidifferent

johnybean wrote: »

And how did you connect all of the drives to the motherboard (Sorry for all the questions)

I had an 8 port HP 410 Raid card so four ports for the large sleds and 4 ports for the 4 in 1. That left the 4 port multilane from the mother board unused if I wanted to plug in the 6 in 1 instead.

johnybean

howamidifferent wrote: »

I had an 8 port HP 410 Raid card so four ports for the large sleds and 4 ports for the 4 in 1. That left the 4 port multilane from the mother board unused if I wanted to plug in the 6 in 1 instead.

Wow! This sounds awesome! If I got this card and 6 SATA cables and your enclosure and a splitter for the power then I would be able to add up to 6 more drives?

howamidifferent

johnybean wrote: »

Wow! This sounds awesome! If I got this card and 6 SATA cables and your enclosure and a splitter for the power then I would be able to add up to 6 more drives?

That's the card but you need one with a low profile bracket. That's full height. I have so much crap I probably have the low profile bracket lying around.
The 6 cables come with the enclosure so no need to buy seperately.

johnybean

howamidifferent wrote: »

That's the card but you need one with a low profile bracket. That's full height. I have so much crap I probably have the low profile bracket lying around.
The 6 cables come with the enclosure so no need to buy seperately.

PM sent

Danger781

If anyone is interested I'll be documenting my experience with this server in my blog;
http://manninglife.blogspot.ie/

The three most recent posts are since I got the G1610T and the ones before are my feeble attempts at installing a level-2 hypervisor on my desktop.. interesting read if that is your sort of thing

horgan_p

Would you need to upgrade the raid controller in this ?
If I'm reading it correctly this box wont do hardware RAID 5 ?

johnybean

Just reading up on the RAID card recommended on the previous page and I was wondering, can a card like this be used just to expand the number of ports without getting into any RAID configuration? I currently use Flexraid for my redundancy so I dont want to start messing around with RAID 0,1 or anything like that. Can I simply add the likes of this card to the pcie slot on the microserver motherboard and start plugging in new drives and have them appear in device manager ready to be added to my spanned flexraid pool?

stimpson

johnybean wrote: »

Just reading up on the RAID card recommended on the previous page and I was wondering, can a card like this be used just to expand the number of ports without getting into any RAID configuration? I currently use Flexraid for my redundancy so I dont want to start messing around with RAID 0,1 or anything like that. Can I simply add the likes of this card to the pcie slot on the microserver motherboard and start plugging in new drives and have them appear in device manager ready to be added to my spanned flexraid pool?

It must have a half height bracket to fit, even then I'm not sure you'll have enough physical space in the machine for that particular card as it's quite long.

One of these should do the job: http://www.newegg.com/global/ie/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124064

You'll need to think about power consumption though - the PSU on the N54L is only 150W I think...

johnybean

stimpson wrote: »

It must have a half height bracket to fit, even then I'm not sure you'll have enough physical space in the machine for that particular card as it's quite long.

One of these should do the job: http://www.newegg.com/global/ie/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124064

You'll need to think about power consumption though - the PSU on the N54L is only 150W I think...

I was thinking that myself (about the power consumption) I will have 4 drives in the built in bays and 6 drives in the 6 in 1 odd cage, suppose I could just give it a lash and see how I get on!

stimpson

Umm..LOL???

I wouldn't advise giving it a lash. Bad things could happen, and with the possibility of losing data, I wouldn't risk it. Find the power consumption for all of your components and ensure it doesn't exceed 150W.

If you're close to or exceed the 150W I'd be upgrading the PSU before switching it on.

ActionHank

I would go with the Lenovo TS140. Much better specs and not much dearer after you count in new hard drive and extra bit of RAM for the Microserver. The CPU in Lenovo is a Quad Core Xeon e3-1226 v3, which is about 4 times faster than the Celeron, and give you nice future proofing for many years to come. Works out at around €350 inc. delivery after cashback.

http://www.serversplus.com/servers/tower_servers/lenovo_tower_servers/svlen-70a50022uk

80s Synth Pop

any sign of HP Proliant Gen9 Microserver yet? I wonder what the specs are vs the Lenovo TS140

johnybean

stimpson wrote: »

Umm..LOL???

I wouldn't advise giving it a lash. Bad things could happen, and with the possibility of losing data, I wouldn't risk it. Find the power consumption for all of your components and ensure it doesn't exceed 150W.

If you're close to or exceed the 150W I'd be upgrading the PSU before switching it on.

I think the safest option is to carry on with the microserver for now and start saving up for a new build server

Danger781

Most of my parts have been shipped so by next weekend I should be able to start working. Bought 16GB ECC RAM, 2 x 3TD Reds, and the PCIe SATA controller linked by stimpson. Have two 1TB internals in my desktop so will transfer over at least one of those, if not both. Have a spare SSD to set up as cache also. Will be trying the unRAID 6 free trial for 30 days as it seems to address everything I want / need. Did a little write up on how the NAS functionality works in unRAID since I was intrigued by how they approached it - It's unlike your standard RAID setup as the array is not lost if two drives die at once AND you can use drives of varying sizes. Pretty cool.

Link if anyone is interested.

stimpson

Just a couple of things

- unRAID doesn't do striping. Each drive is an individual file system and parity is calculated across all drives in the array.
- you aren't protected from two simultaneous drive failures, only one. But as each drive is an individual filesystem, you only lose the data on the two drives that fail simultaneously. And because there is no mirroring, the likelihood of two drives failing simultaneously is much less (if you have mirroring of two identical drives they will both have an identical service life so if one fails then it's mirror may also fail around the same time.

Danger781

stimpson wrote: »

unRAID doesn't do striping. Each drive is an individual file system and parity is calculated across all drives in the array. .

Really?

I don't know what game me that idea.. had to go back to the website to confirm that and there is indeed no mention of striping.. post removed for now

So really there is no performance improvements then without using an SSD as cache?

stimpson

Danger781 wrote: »

Really?

I don't know what game me that idea.. had to go back to the website to confirm that and there is indeed no mention of striping.. post removed for now

So really there is no performance improvements then without using an SSD as cache?

Performance degradation if anything. Writes are slowed down without a cache due to parity calculation. Reads are unaffected though and it maximises space efficiency as you just have one parity drive. When you think about it it's ideal for a media server as you will only write your data once - you're not rewriting your data all the time. I ran mine with a 250 GB HDD as a cache for over a year and the performance was fine. I only upgraded to SSD recently.

There is a plugin that will allow you to mount drives outside the array which might be better if you want to run a virtualised OS. Although once it's cached and you're not too pushed about losing a days work if something goes wrong then the array should be fine speed wise.

davork

So I ended up giving in and getting the E3-1265LV2 from these guys http://www.jacob-computer.de/ I paid using amazon and shipped to parcel motel... the artic silver and removal stuff I got from amazon.co.uk so hopefully everything will arrive together (unlike the 4 TB drives which i-parcel sent on a tour of Europe from london to get to dublin)

My beasty is installing it's W2012R2 patches now. I'm off to sleep!

johnny_adidas

How would the HP Proliant Microserver Gen 8 G1610 compare in terms of performance?

I'm currently using amahi on an old desktop so looking to cut power usage. I assume I can run the same setup in the HP

Danger781

Well feck sake.. just trying to install one of my new NAS drives and I find that this screw is a messed up shape. It's supposed to be a standard cross. My screwdriver is refusing to grip it - It just keeps sliding through it. No issues on any of the other screws.

What do?

EDIT: After some further attempts I managed to unscrew it. Took me turning the screwdriver an odd angle but it worked.