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HP ProLiant MicroServer

oreillykm · 2011-03-11 15:03:49

Just took delivery of one of these (http://www.ebuyer.com/product/253305) from eBuyer. The ebuyer cost is 240 pounds - but you get a cheque back for 100 pounds from the supplier directly. So, 140 pounds. 4 bays for drives and no OS - ideal as a NAS maybe? Am gonna throw linux on it.

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#182 15-05-2011 3:04pm
Jurisprudence

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Great find. That 6 bay Sharkoon bay looks like exactly the thing I was looking for the Microserver but is it different from the Lindy and the Patriot. From whats been said above do the Lindy and Patriot handle everything themselves but the Sharkoon needs additional equipment to use? Sorry if I'm being dim (its glandular)

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#183 15-05-2011 3:22pm
howamidifferent

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Jurisprudence wrote: »

Great find. That 6 bay Sharkoon bay looks like exactly the thing I was looking for the Microserver but is it different from the Lindy and the Patriot. From whats been said above do the Lindy and Patriot handle everything themselves but the Sharkoon needs additional equipment to use? Sorry if I'm being dim (its glandular)

There are a total of six sata ports on the onboard controller of the HP Microserver. Four are used for the internal drive caddies, one for the optical disk if installed and the other for the esata connector. If you wish to use one of these 4 or 6 port caddies as well as the internal caddies then you will need an additional sata controller card. i have a HP P410 Smart Array controller in mine which gives me an additional 8 ports but you will need to buy something to control the 4 or 6 bay caddies if you install one... The 8 port controllers are usually expensive but you might get a 4 port and a 2 port cheaply....

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#184 15-05-2011 5:26pm
Supercell

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Does the memory in these work better in pairs?
Eg is 1+ 4GB Slower than 2 x 2GB ? (assuming <4GB ram in use by the OS ?)

Thanks.

https://www.loughlinstown.ie
Have a weather station?, why not join the Ireland Weather Network - http://irelandweather.eu/

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#185 16-05-2011 7:43am
tonto2010

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Supercell wrote: »

Does the memory in these work better in pairs?
Eg is 1+ 4GB Slower than 2 x 2GB ? (assuming <4GB ram in use by the OS ?)

Thanks.

As its DDR I would have thought so, anyone else care to comment? not sure if it would make so much of a difference that I would leave out the extra gig though.

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#186 16-05-2011 2:43pm
Jurisprudence

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Right now my head is completely melted. Just took delivery of my 2x 4gb Geil Value Series Ram and wouldn't ya know it the heat spreaders are about 2mm too high for the Microserver. Anyone know how to get them off. Some say they may be epoxy attached, others say you can hairdryer heat spreaders off. Anyone had any experience with getting off Geil heat spreaders. Need a coffee after all this

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#187 16-05-2011 5:41pm
Moriarty

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Just spotted this

Is there a best spot to grab these at the moment for direct shipping to Ireland? How cheap has it been found for where the rebate still works?

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#188 16-05-2011 5:52pm
pegasus425

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Moriarty wrote: »

Just spotted this

Is there a best spot to grab these at the moment for direct shipping to Ireland? How cheap has it been found for where the rebate still works?

Elara selling it for 272.25 Euro (plus 8 Euro delivery)

http://www.elara.ie/productdetail.aspx?productcode=ECE2118127

This is the Rebate form:

http://www.elara.ie/microserver.pdf

Have to purchase before the end of May and return the claim form by July 1st.

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#189 16-05-2011 5:57pm
Jonathan

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Moriarty wrote: »

Is there a best spot to grab these at the moment for direct shipping to Ireland? How cheap has it been found for where the rebate still works?

Elara is cheapest and easiest I'd say.

While we are at it:
Where is the best place for 2 TB Samsung drives?

Scan is the cheapest atm as far as I can see. Works out cheaper than Amazon when buying 4 of them.

Is there anywhere else cheaper?

EDIT: too slow.

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#190 16-05-2011 7:53pm
Voodu Child

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Product must have been delivered & invoiced between 1 February - 31 May 2011

Does that mean if I order today but there is some kind of delay and it isn't delivered until June that I don't qualify for the cashback?

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#191 16-05-2011 7:58pm
pegasus425

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Voodu Child wrote: »

Does that mean if I order today but there is some kind of delay and it isn't delivered until June that I don't qualify for the cashback?

Probably would not qualify in that case.

However, Elara generally ship the next day. When I ordered mine last week, it shipped the next day. Could always cancel in the unlikely event of a delay, but I think they have plenty in stock.

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#192 17-05-2011 2:56pm
howamidifferent

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You can download your invoice as soon as you've paid for the item and that will have the purchase date on it, which is what matters...As long as its before May 31st then your ok...:)

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#193 17-05-2011 6:43pm
mcgovern

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Really considering going for this now, basically to act as a NAS and a torrent server, probably an itunes server too.
Currently I have a 1TB external hard drive fairly full of movies, a 1 TB internal Samsung F3 75% full of TV shows, and about 500GB of music which seems to be spread everywhere. I'd like to have some redundancy in case of hard drive fail, but know nothing about RAID or Linux. What sort of setup would I need?
It would be streaming to a Windows 7 PC, an Xbox 360, a PS3 and potentially an XP laptop, and my main concern would be hardware.
Is the included RAM enough, and what sort of hard drives would I need?
Thanks,

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#194 17-05-2011 9:33pm
howamidifferent

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The included ram would be more than enough for many linux distros.
Windows OS's will probably do better with more. I've Win2008R2 on mine and I've seen it using 6.5GB of 8GB installed when doing multiple things at once.

As for hard drives you can use the latest 3TB as storage drives but you will need something smaller than 2TB as a boot drive, even use the included 250GB drive as your OS drive and get bigger drives for storage.

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#195 19-05-2011 11:03pm
Akula

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machalla wrote: »

I'm using 4x2Tb disk raid 5 zfs array so instead of raid 1 mirroring to only(!) give me 4Tb of data storage, I have about 5.7-5.9TB of available storage. Of course time will tell if this proves to be a sensible configuration or not. It is a backup server (theres another primary server also) so I have some redundancy there. I'm playing with configurations to see what I can learn from doing so as well.

This is exactly the setup I want. What OS are you using to do this?

The specs of the HP box mention RAID 0 and 1 only? Presume this is a software RAID 5 setup you have running?

Anybody have any problems with software RAID 5? Ultimately what I want to run is a solid mediaserver with redundant storage.

Plan is to point an XBMC box at it....

Anybody see any problems with that?

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#196 19-05-2011 11:18pm
machalla

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I'm using Vmware ESXI. I've broken that into two primary vmware machines Freenas 8 for the file storage aspect and Windows Server 2008 for my own uses.

I'd recommend just going with a pure Freenas setup without ESXI unless you want the option to run another OS at the same time. Its a software raid setup as I don't have the cash to lay out on a hardware raid card at the moment. There are some recommendations on the thread for which cards would be suitable if you can afford it.

If not software raid should be adequate.

You could always do something similar with Centos or Ubuntu if you'd prefer a full blown OS.

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#197 20-05-2011 11:55am
Akula

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Interesting, how much RAM are you using?

Any performance hit from using vmware or other drawbacks?

Anybody looked into whether it would be possible to upgrade that AMD processor at some point?

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#198 20-05-2011 11:58am
Jonathan

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Just a tip off that the 2 TB Samsung F4s are now down to €65 delivered on Amazon.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=72316698&postcount=493

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-EcoGreen-5400RPM-SATA-II-Internal/dp/B0042SGDVG/ref=sr_1_2?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1305843652&sr=1-2

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#199 20-05-2011 12:58pm
machalla

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Akula wrote: »

Interesting, how much RAM are you using?

Any performance hit from using vmware or other drawbacks?

Anybody looked into whether it would be possible to upgrade that AMD processor at some point?

I went a bit mad and went for the full 8Gb. Its something of a play box as well as a file server. I haven't seen a huge hit on performance but I'm not stressing it too much anyway as its a backup file server for my primary.

I am not sure the Freenas network card drivers are optimised for what this machine is using as I think it can be a little slower than it should be when copying large files but that may just be me. I haven't looked into it too much.

Depending on your requirements (if only a file server) you wouldn't need to upgrade the ram to use it as a pure file server.

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#200 20-05-2011 2:25pm
Akula

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Presume vmware would struggle with just the stock 1 gig

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#201 20-05-2011 2:48pm
carbsy

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Akula wrote: »

Presume vmware would struggle with just the stock 1 gig

ESXi needs 2GB to even install.

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#202 20-05-2011 3:38pm
machalla

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Yes if you are definitely going to use vmware you will have to upgrade the ram to 3-4Gb. You could get away with a 2gb and 1gb that came with it (I ran 5Gb for a little while till I got the extra 4gb stick).

If you just use it as a backend file server (no vmware) you probably won't have to though. Do you see a reason for VMware? For me its handy to able to have a windows server to play with but thats not everyones need and it sounds like you just need it to serve out content to an xbmc install.

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#203 20-05-2011 3:48pm
Jonathan

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Bear in mind if a file server is your primary objective, but you occasionally want to play around with virtual machines, you can just install Virtualbox on your file server OS and fire them up when needed. Its a trade off though. Better system performance overall in return for poorer virtual machine performance.

I currently do that with Debian on mine

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#204 20-05-2011 3:51pm
pegasus425

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Jonathan wrote: »

Bear in mind if a file server is your primary objective, but you occasionally want to play around with virtual machines, you can just install Virtualbox on your file server OS and fire them up when needed. Its a trade off though. Better system performance overall in return for poorer virtual machine performance.

I currently do that with Debian on mine

As a file server is my primary objective (and I have just the standard 1gb Ram at the moment) what operating system would you recommend? All the clients will be windows based PC's.

Would FreeNas be suitable? And can it be installed from a USB Flash Drive?

Many Thanks.

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#205 20-05-2011 11:12pm
mcgovern

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pegasus425 wrote: »

As a file server is my primary objective (and I have just the standard 1gb Ram at the moment) what operating system would you recommend? All the clients will be windows based PC's.

Would FreeNas be suitable? And can it be installed from a USB Flash Drive?

Many Thanks.

I only got mine and I'm far from a Linux expert, but I have Ubuntu on mine, and have it working ok. Samba shares for Windows and MediaTomb for the PS3. Installed from a USB drive (eventually, took about 10 downloads of the image before it actually worked).

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#206 21-05-2011 12:35am
breathn

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Jonathan wrote: »

Just a tip off that the 2 TB Samsung F4s are now down to €65 delivered on Amazon.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=72316698&postcount=493

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Samsung-EcoGreen-5400RPM-SATA-II-Internal/dp/B0042SGDVG/ref=sr_1_2?s=computers&ie=UTF8&qid=1305843652&sr=1-2

Oh my gosh, look at the reviews. Everyone complaining at the drives are so poorly packaged and I see a comment that it's still shipping with an old bad firmware.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B0042SGDVG/ref=cm_cr_dp_synop?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

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#207 21-05-2011 11:38am
Jonathan

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breathn wrote: »

Oh my gosh, look at the reviews. Everyone complaining at the drives are so poorly packaged and I see a comment that it's still shipping with an old bad firmware.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B0042SGDVG/ref=cm_cr_dp_synop?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=0&sortBy=bySubmissionDateDescending

Yup. People are aware of Amazon's practices, but sending them a polite email seems to solve any problems.

EDIT: the price has gone back up now so nevermind.

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#208 21-05-2011 12:08pm
pegasus425

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mcgovern wrote: »

I only got mine and I'm far from a Linux expert, but I have Ubuntu on mine, and have it working ok. Samba shares for Windows and MediaTomb for the PS3. Installed from a USB drive (eventually, took about 10 downloads of the image before it actually worked).

Thanks for that. I might try ubuntu. Is there any advantage of Ubuntu vs FreeNas (in terms of using it solely as a fileserver)? And can FreeNas be installed via USB Flash Drive (I seem to remember someone posting that you would need an optical drive to install it). Many Thanks.

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#209 21-05-2011 12:23pm
Jonathan

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pegasus425 wrote: »

Thanks for that. I might try ubuntu. Is there any advantage of Ubuntu vs FreeNas (in terms of using it solely as a fileserver)? And can FreeNas be installed via USB Flash Drive (I seem to remember someone posting that you would need an optical drive to install it). Many Thanks.

Ubuntu is a full Linux distribution, and you can install a whole plethora of extra applications.

FreeNAS is BSD based, and is more aimed as a thin pure file server OS.

Both can be installed from a USB stick. Check out UNetBootin.

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#210 22-05-2011 3:31pm
vibe666

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garion wrote: »

Just wondering if anyone can recommend a good 64GB SSD? It's the missing piece to my puzzle!

if you can live without the extra 4gb, you'd have to go a long way to beat one of these bad boys!

£101.99 for:

- Capacity: 60GB
- Controller: SandForce SF-2281
- Maximum Read: 525MB/sec
- Maximum Write: 475MB/sec
- Max I/O Per Second (IOPS): 50,000 IOPS (4KB File)
- NAND Flash: Multi-Level Cell (MLC)
- Interface: SATA-III / 6Gbps (Backwards compatible with SATA-II / 3Gbps)
- TRIM Support (Requires Windows 7)
- Warranty: 3 Years

for the price, it pretty much wipes the floor with any other SSD out there.

I'm currently trying to buy two from overclockers myself to replace a single 2nd gen 60gb ssd boot my main pc off, but i'm having some issues with payment via my ptsb visa debit card on their website.

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#211 24-05-2011 1:48pm
garion

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vibe666 wrote: »

if you can live without the extra 4gb, you'd have to go a long way to beat one of these bad boys!

£101.99 for:

- Capacity: 60GB
- Controller: SandForce SF-2281
- Maximum Read: 525MB/sec
- Maximum Write: 475MB/sec
- Max I/O Per Second (IOPS): 50,000 IOPS (4KB File)
- NAND Flash: Multi-Level Cell (MLC)
- Interface: SATA-III / 6Gbps (Backwards compatible with SATA-II / 3Gbps)
- TRIM Support (Requires Windows 7)
- Warranty: 3 Years

for the price, it pretty much wipes the floor with any other SSD out there.

I'm currently trying to buy two from overclockers myself to replace a single 2nd gen 60gb ssd boot my main pc off, but i'm having some issues with payment via my ptsb visa debit card on their website.

Damn, just spent €150 on a 64GB SSD from Crucial! That'll teach me not to do my research!

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