HP ProLiant MicroServer

Moriarty

What drives are people jumping for?

I've heard a few reports of certain eco-green drives not playing ball with the microserver. I'm looking at 4x 2TB, but not entirely sure which to get going by some of the horror stories.

Jonathan

Moriarty wrote: »

What drives are people jumping for?

I've heard a few reports of certain eco-green drives not playing ball with the microserver. I'm looking at 4x 2TB, but not entirely sure which to get going by some of the horror stories.

I'm using Samsung HD204UI/Z4 drives.

Wcool

Thanks for the answers.
So it looks I can get away with buying 2 new drives.

And then spend weeks copying data :P

Sorry one more question: in a Raid setup, can i still set my disks to spin down after let's say 15 min? I really hate the idea of using another 20 watt for no reason at all.

Jonathan

Wcool wrote: »

Sorry one more question: in a Raid setup, can i still set my disks to spin down after let's say 15 min? I really hate the idea of using another 20 watt for no reason at all.

Yup. I just stick the following in /etc/rc.local

hdparm -S120 /dev/sd[abcde]

The RAID drives knock off then about 1 second apart. They are also staggered on start up to reduce load on the PSU.

justsomebloke

anyone else had any problems with their's?

Ok got mine yesterday and had it up and running on 2008 R2 evaluation but now it seems to be dead. Power led is staying orange when I try and turn it on nothing happens.

justsomebloke

hmmm it seems to psu is fubared, as I can connect it to another PSU in another machine and get video.


So anyone else had any PSU problems?

Wcool

Ordered my server from dabs.ie plus a few bits and pieces like disks and memory.

Loads of ****e. My payment kept failing but they can't/won't tell me why so I can't fix it. I used another payment method and the order was for 3 days in 'Allocated'. Finally today that payment did not come through either.
'Some issue with your card, for reasons you understand we can't tell you why'.
NO I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

When you try to phone them, their phone number is 'Out of Service'.

I cancelled and am going to order elsewhere. Time wasters.

vibe666

Wcool, I can highly recommend elara.ie as an alternative if you're looking for somewhere else to buy from. I always find they deliver in stock items quickly and you can even choose pick up from their delivery depot just off the M50 if you have a car and want it even quicker.

i've ordered off them half a dozen times or more now and never had a single issue.

I used to use komplett.ie a lot as well, but they have gone downhill recently IMHO with delays in orders etc.

Wcool

Elara is great but unfortunately they don't have everything I need.
But will use them as much as I can

vibe666

I actually just went to order some Samsung Spinpoint HDD's off them, but it looks like they don't stock any Samsung HDD's any more.

in other news, I then went on to overclockers.co.uk and ordered four 2tb Spinpoints and two packs of their budget 200mbps homeplugs at 11:57am today and just got a message at 13:30 to say that they had just been shipped and they should be with me on Monday, which was pretty damn fast imho.

machalla

vibe666 wrote: »

I actually just went to order some Samsung Spinpoint HDD's off them, but it looks like they don't stock any Samsung HDD's any more.

in other news, I then went on to overclockers.co.uk and ordered four 2tb Spinpoints and two packs of their budget 200mbps homeplugs at 11:57am today and just got a message at 13:30 to say that they had just been shipped and they should be with me on Monday, which was pretty damn fast imho.

Its funny the different experiences people have with online retailers. I have cancelled every single order I ever tried to put through with Overclockers. Of the various attempts I had, they claimed they had stock of something they didn't, messed me about with delivery and then problems with faulty goods on arrival.

Dabs are often slow and problematic as well although if you contact their CEO directly complaining it may get sorted out.

Elara are fine but usually not the cheapest option. Still they are reliable at least.

Wcool

Fully agree, machalla. It looks like all suppliers do a full circle every 10 years

I checked Elara but most of what i wanted to order extra is not in the product catalogue or extremely expensive.

Examples:
- memory: 45 euro instead of 25 (they only stock the expensive Kingston and Corsair brands)
- no Samsung 2T drives
- no cheap gigabit PCIe ethernet card
- no cheap 750Gb 2.5" disks (80e instead of 55e)
- no replacement 5.25 bay to put in an extra hot swappable 2T disk

Still it won't stop me ordering the HP server from Elara So thank you Elara for stocking it at a decent price.
But I guess the rest is going to be Hardwareversand.de. That's a hassle too from what i remember from 4 years ago. Last option is Amazon as Komplett is not Complete either.

Weird, back in the old days (5-8 years ago) I always used Dabs(.com) and Komplett and they were good, fast and cheap.

martiin

Wcool wrote: »

Ordered my server from dabs.ie plus a few bits and pieces like disks and memory.

Loads of ****e. My payment kept failing but they can't/won't tell me why so I can't fix it. I used another payment method and the order was for 3 days in 'Allocated'. Finally today that payment did not come through either.
'Some issue with your card, for reasons you understand we can't tell you why'.
NO I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

When you try to phone them, their phone number is 'Out of Service'.

I cancelled and am going to order elsewhere. Time wasters.

Dabs has worst customer service I've ever seen, also they using **** shipping couriers eg Parcel Force and they have huge backlog for shipping, maybe not enough staff? I don't know. I like pixmania, is little more expensive but shipping take usually no more than 48hrs. So if you can order somwhere else, do it.

Do-more

I'm looking at getting a server which will be used for file sharing between a number of PC's in the house and also for blu ray rips to an internet enabled TV (connected with Ethernet cable).

My son also keeps hassling me to set up a minecraft server so he and a few of his mates can play on it together.

Which of the various servers on this thread would people recommend for me?

Thanks

D-M

vibe666

Do-more wrote: »

I'm looking at getting a server which will be used for file sharing between a number of PC's in the house and also for blu ray rips to an internet enabled TV (connected with Ethernet cable).

My son also keeps hassling me to set up a minecraft server so he and a few of his mates can play on it together.

Which of the various servers on this thread would people recommend for me?

Thanks

D-M

I'm not sure about minecraft servers, but if you plan on using a few drives for storage and are thinking about expandability and RAID etc. then you'd probably be better served with the HP ML110 G6, esp. Now there is the cashback on them too.

there's plenty of internal space for drives and lots of room for upgrades to the ram and cpu with the socket 1156 mobo.

I'm on my phone now so I'm not going to spend all day typing, but if you've got any questions I'll reply later from home.

machalla

The problem is that none of the Irish e-tailers seem to do the HP ProLiant ML110 G6 (with Quad core Xeon) at anything approaching a reasonable price. The Elara model has 2Gb of ram listed as opposed to the others only having 1Gb but other than that I think the specs are the same. The prices are radically different though..

Ebuyers price £345 which is roughly €395 (but they won't deliver here). Thats without the extra £110 off the price.

Dabs.ie - €526

Elara - €767.14 are just ridiculous.

So unless you can get the Xeon equipped ML110 G6 at the UK prices theres no bargain there. None of the above links include the cashback price btw.

If Ebuyer did deliver here it would be a bargain theres no doubt. As you can see though buying locally is no bargain at all.

I am not sure about the Microserver being able to do double duty as a minecraft server. You need to check what the minimum specs would be processor wise as the microserver processor is a low power one not suited to anything hugely intensive.

If its just file storage I can't see anything wrong with the Microserver at the price after discount of about €150-170.

If someone can find the ML110 G6 at a cheaper price I'd be interested.

vibe666

machalla wrote: »

The problem is that none of the Irish e-tailers seem to do the HP ProLiant ML110 G6 (with Quad core Xeon) at anything approaching a reasonable price.

If someone can find the ML110 G6 at a cheaper price I'd be interested.

you don't need to go for the top end one right out of the gate though, you can get the cheaper one with the G6950 CPU for €271.04 Incl Vat from Elara (like i did a few months back), but i don't think that qualifies for the cashback though. the good news is, it's identical to the higher end G6's except for the CPU, so you can just upgrade that later on down the line when the prices for them comes down a bit.

OR, you *could* just buy the X3430 quad core Xeon from Elara for €404.14 Incl Vat which DOES qualify for the HP cashback offer til the end of July (Ask your Preferred Distributors about OPG 86636127) which will then leave you with a pretty decent quad core Xeon server for €284.14 (only €13.10 more than the base G6950 model) after the rebate.

you could even save yourself the delivery charges if you're in or around Dublin by picking up from their Dublin depot.

what do I win for finding it?

Cliff77

HPshop.ie is showing it for €383.11. €10 extra for delivery.

machalla

vibe666 wrote: »

what do I win for finding it?

Thumbs up?

I'm not sure if I should be pleased that I can rely on you to find a cheaper price or annoyed that you've now just encouraged me to think about one of these too

Do-more

I've done a bit of googling and it seems there are plenty of guys running a minecraft server on fairly low powered machines, the advice seems to be to have it on a 10,000 rpm HDD as it reads and writes a hell of a lot.

The ML110 looks like it will be well able to run it.

Now how can I justify the expense to the missus?

Wcool

No doubt the HP ProLiant ML110 will do the job perfectly but don't you think it is a bit of overkill?

IMHO for a box that is on 24x7x365 you also want some energy efficiency.
The AMD based Neo will run < 50 watts, while the Xeon I estimate will be between 100 and 150 watts (Does anyone know?)

That is quite a lot of money per year
1000W/h is 16 cents so 100W/h is 1.6 cents = 140 euro per year
(And i think it will use more than 100W/h)

The Neo is less than 70 euro per year

Maybe a consideration?

vibe666

Wcool wrote: »

No doubt the HP ProLiant ML110 will do the job perfectly but don't you think it is a bit of overkill?

maybe if it was just as a minecraft server, but not if it's going to be a file server and probably a download box and a few other things to boot.

i'm all for saving money on power consumption, but not at the expense of versatility and upgradeability and those Neo & Atom 'micro' servers just don't have that in the same way as a proper server does.

as for fast disk writes, a half decent SSD will wipe the floor with any 10k drive you'll find (and most likely for less money these days) and you'll still have room inside the ML110 G6 for 4 or more 3.5" drives for mass storage.

with a little bit of shoehorning, mine's about to get eight 2tb drives in it next week.

Wcool

You must be a speed freak Vibe666

At the moment i have this:
VIA Eden Mini-ITX fanless

I have had it for 4 years, it had up to 7 disks (currently 4) with an extra PCI card. It runs 2 WAN connections, samba, DC+, FTP server, torrents, XFCE GUI, windows wine, NTP, proxy server, subsonic music server, Spider Oak and Tonido software, NX remote server + lot's of network admin software .
It all runs in 1GB without swapping, and serves 4 computers. Even with this running all the time it can copy 5 files at the same time + serve a XBMC client without hiccups and uses < 60 watt with 5 disks spinning. 40 idle.
The only reason I want the Proliant is because I can't do media transcoding on the fly.
But if my old box can already easily serve 4 files in parallel, isn't a Xeon really overkill? The Xeon is nice if you want to have a Build/Compile server, Media encoder, busy website or are experimenting with virtual servers.

On the disks: i have 4 2Tb disks at the moment and extendability is a concern. But the funny bit is that 3 years ago a I was messing with 3Tb spread over 6 disks. But because disks have become 4x bigger for the same money in the last 3 years I now actually have *less* disks while my memory usage has doubled! I put my money on further progression of technology. No doubt in a year, one 3T disk will cost the same as a 2T now and I can go from 8T to 12T relatively cheap.

Of course if you need more than 8T now, you might have a space problem, I can still go to 10T via the drive conversion.

An SSD would not be useful for me either as almost all my usual programs are in RAM, but for the minecraft server it seems a perfect match.

vibe666

ah yeah, but that's all linuxy stuff. most of us start sweating at the mere thought of a command line these days, so we need some grunt under the bonnet to drive our nice pretty GUI's so we can get stuff done!

my ML110 is running the ESXi v5 beta at the moment and the plan is to put eight 2tb disks in it and use them (with an 8 port SATA RAID controller) as one big datastore for ESXi and then have an openfiler VM and let that manage the whole thing (primarily as a file server to take over from my NAS which i'm going to be getting rid of) and dish it out to other VM's and physical machines as required.

Cliff77

One question on the ML110 though. Looking at the specs it states that the max internal storage for SATA is 4TB, (4 x 1TB 3.5" drives). Probably a dumb question, but what is the reasoning behind this? Is it a limitation of the controller? Was lookingto put 4 x 2TB drives in.

vibe666

some motherboards will only support drives up to 2tb in size, but there are usually firmware updates to get around this for newer drives >2tb, but I'm not aware of any such limitations with 1tb drives.

i imagine that it is a similar case to the RAM limit being listed at 8gb (4x 2gb) even though the ML110 G6 supports (at least) 16gb of ram, which i've always put down to availability of parts to test with at the time they were first released, although it seems odd that they couldn't get hold of drives bigger than 1tb considering how long 1.5tb and 2tb drives have been around.

i'll be using a separate RAID controller for mine though, so fingers crossed it won't be an issue either way as long as ESXi actually supports my RAID card, which seems to be somewhat of a grey area.

Do-more

vibe666 wrote: »

as for fast disk writes, a half decent SSD will wipe the floor with any 10k drive you'll find

Will the constant read/writing not have a detrimental effect on the health of the SSD?

vibe666

Do-more wrote: »

Will the constant read/writing not have a detrimental effect on the health of the SSD?

i was actually trying to find a comparison of failure rates between 10k drives and SSD's, but they seem to be measuring them differently, although i suspect that in reality you are most likely correct.

you could go for a hybrid drive as an alternative? http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-233-SE

there's a video on the page there showing a speed comparison between an SSD, a 7200rpm, a 10k rpm & a hybrid drive so you can see a rough speed comparison.

Kinetic^

Have they extended this to August?

Do-more

Kinetic^ wrote: »

Have they extended this to August?

No update on their website, still saying it expired on July 31.