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So I just remembered I have a HP ProLiant Microserver that has been sitting around since I ordered it, and figure I should actually do something with it. I just want to use it as a file server for all my tv/movies I've ripped from dvds/recorded with media centre, so what would the best option be? I do have a copy of WHSv1 laying around unused and I do like the idea of drive extender, but I've heard a bit about ZFS too and as far as I can tell it has less overhead when it comes to redundancy and recovering from drive failures (also it would take advantage of the ECC ram I can use in the Microserver). How hard is it to learn enough of OpenSolaris to build a functional file server for someone with little *nix experience (my last linux system was Ubuntu about 8 years ago when I was playing Wolfenstein Enemy Territory) and I know its expandable, but do multiple vdevs appear as one large storage pool like Drive Extender does in WHS? Or should I just stick with WHS since I've got it available?
Tornhelm fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Jun 26, 2011 |
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Jun 26, 2011 06:28
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jeeves posted:If you don't want to pay out the rear for a pre-made solution but instead want to take the chance that I did of dealing with the hassle of setting up your own OS, go for the Proliant Microserver. Or if you're bored, a few Australians have got it upto 19TB (5x3TB, 4x1TB and a system + cache drive) all in that tiny case. 
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Jul 15, 2011 11:01
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jeeves posted:Gotta keep that case off or else I am sure it will burst into flames. Actually not really - at idle the hottest drive is that 3TB drive in the middle at 30 Celsius.
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Jul 15, 2011 12:30
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http://forums.overclockers.com.au/showthread.php?t=958208 That is the ProLiant Microserver owners thread on OCAU, and in there you'll find info on pretty much everything - from case mods to flashing the modded BIOS to enable ACHI on the 5th sata port, to installing SolarisExpress and creating a ZFS pool. The single best thing about the microservers is the ability to use ECC ram in it (2x4GB sticks), which when you pair it with ZFS gives damned good detection and error correction for your data.
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Jul 15, 2011 23:12
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LamoTheKid posted:No idea. But I formatted the drive last night, and rsynced. Let me say, a USB Hd plus ZFS-Fuse is slowwwwww. Took 18 hours to transfer 1.4 TB. Sure theres no write-back cache or something you forgot to enable? Thats about the performance I was getting transferring stuff to my Raid5 array last time I forgot to enable the cache.
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Jul 23, 2011 23:44
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IOwnCalculus posted:Can you sun any form of torrent / sabnzbd server on there as well, or are you going to create a Linux VM to do that? For SABnzbd it involves installing a few packages manually, but you can run it fine - on OpenSolaris at least. Transmission I think is the client of choice for torrents.
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Jul 24, 2011 21:08
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clavicle posted:I know, but it's like this for almost anything that comes from abroad, we have high taxes and import tariffs. If I use a mail forwarder and it gets stopped by customs I have to pay 60% in taxes. Even if you pay 60% extra in taxes, it will still probably come out cheaper than building it yourself. The entire box itself is about the same price as the psu/cpu/mobo if you get it from newegg, cheaper if you get it from somewhere else and it wouldn't add much more to the cost when you add in the case too. Then all you need is the ram and hdd's. Also, see if your country has a HP site - quite a few Australians bought one that way after the main stores ran out of stock, and the price that way might be competitive.
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Aug 12, 2011 09:28
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Puddin posted:Can anyone recommend a video card to suit the N36L? Picked one up the other day and I'm really impressed with it. Love the slide out motherboard. Either the ati 5450 or the nvidia 210/520 are the most popular options. https://spreadsheets1.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?authkey=CImGkocJ&hl=en&key=tHx2pDE7M2SIWsbq0hs352A&hl=en&authkey=CImGkocJ#gid=0 Thats from the first post of the OCAU owners thread, and it gives a pretty damned good cross-section of the kinds of things people are using it for and what gear they're running it with. The biggest thing to remember with the microserver is that it doesn't come with audo ports so you will either need to use a seperate soundcard (possibly usb based depending on your OS) or have hdmi audio for your videocard and run the sound through that.
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Aug 12, 2011 13:41
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jeeves posted:As some of you may have noted from my previous posts in pages gone by, I have been a little disappointed at the performance of ZFS/Freenas, after buying top of the line equipment (Proliant Microserver+8GB ram) and a gigabit router. Are you still using FreeNAS 8? If so, try going back to FreeNAS 7 - probably build 5543 - and see if that fixes most of your problems. I doubt its been fixed but I do know a few months ago 8 was just a steaming pile of poo poo that should be avoided.
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Aug 15, 2011 12:50
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Puddin posted:Whats the concensus on Hitachi drives now since that firmware fiasco years back? Have they got their poo poo together? According to some chaps who should know (Backblaze) the Hitachi Deskstar 3TB 5K3000's are the best on the market at the moment, with the lowest failure rate.
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Aug 18, 2011 05:12
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heeen posted:Bummer - I thought I read somewhere it was possible. I guess you tried it yourself? On the other hand, mine uses a massive 36w when idle, and as long as you're careful about not overloading the 12v rail, I know people who have replaced the PSU in theirs with a PicoPSu lowering their idle usage to about 18w.
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Sep 8, 2011 13:18
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The microserver can also take ECC ram which is a feature you are unlikely to find on anything else approaching the same price range.
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Sep 14, 2011 02:17
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Evilkiksass posted:So far I have looked at the HP MicroServer which is nice, but only 4 drive capacity, and I don't really want to hack it to access the optical sata port. I have also looked at the Synology offerings, but they seem to jump to $700+ for a 5 bay. With the MicroServer, the "hack" is a bios update to allow it to run at full SATA speed on that port. The default firmware gimps the fifth port for some silly reason and the update just unlocks it. If you don't want to do that, you can easily add in an 8 port raid card and run the drives off of that. My test server at the moment is running 6x3TB (4 normal slots and 2 in the 5" bay using a Nexus Double Twin) in Raid 6 via an Adaptec 3805 card with the OS being run off of a 2.5" drive from the onboard ports. Yes, I know that the 3TB's are overkill for a test server, but I got them at half price from someone selling off his microserver.
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Sep 29, 2011 11:11
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Obviously Erratic posted:Have any of you guys had experience with the HP Microserver N40L? The N40L is exactly the same as the N36L (which is what most of us have) apart from the slightly beefier CPU (1.5 vs 1.3Ghz) so any mention in the thread about the microserver is pretty much applicable.
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Nov 26, 2011 10:42
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necrobobsledder posted:Fat good a hard drive does in a file server if there's no power or signal to it. Look close. I'll say that a Microserver can fit 4 3.5" disks in the hot swap bays and a 3.5" and 2.5" in the upper 5.25" bay comfortably and without modding the case. It fits two 3.5" in the ODD bay if you have something like the Nexus Double Twin bracket, and a 2.5" in the space underneath that. Replace the ODD blanking plate with a mesh one and it'll keep them just as cool as the bottom four drives. That can be a 6x3TB setup with very little fuss or bother (and running the OS off of either a USB or the 2.5" depending on what OS you end up with of course). Edit: For the chap who was looking for info on the N40L bios, your best bet would be to check out the avforums owners thread - the overclockers.com.au megathread is more geared to the N36L afaik. Tornhelm fucked around with this message at 11:12 on Dec 30, 2011 |
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Dec 30, 2011 11:09
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The most popular card for the Microserver is actually the ATI 5450. But pretty much anything that comes with a half-height bracket and isn't too thick will work. I have heard of some people having problems with the 6xxx line that they ended up fixing by cutting off part of the cards heatsink. After that I think most people just use something like XBMC as the front-end and do it that way. Edit: The main reason that people prefer the ATI cards for windows setups is that they support audio over hdmi, which is fairly important since the microserver has no built in audio-out. Tornhelm fucked around with this message at 01:41 on Apr 21, 2012 |
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Apr 21, 2012 01:32
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ashgromnies posted:It might not be a bad idea to load one up with 6x3 TB WD Red drives though. Are there any special mounting considerations to put two additional hard drives in the optical slot? It depends on the mounting bracket. I know a few people who've reported that something like the Nexus DoubleTwin can fit two drives in there without modification and another few who cut out some of the plate at the bottom to provide easier access to the gap underneath (they mounted a 2.5" hdd there to run the OS on it too) and give it a bit better ventilation for those drives. Then again for 6 (or 7 with the OS or swap drive if you run the OS off a USB) drives most people end up putting a cheap 8 port RAID controller in it as well to take advantage of hardware RAID.
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Oct 29, 2012 09:46
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DrDork posted:There's basically no reason to run hardware RAID5 when you can get software ZFS RAIDZ to run well on the N40L with virtually no effort. It works fine as a htpc. I've got one in my parents lounge running Win 7, software raid 5 and using xbmc as the front end. All you need is a cheap passively cooled and video card to run audio over HDMI.
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Dec 17, 2012 13:28
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Froist posted:Hijacking this topic, what's the difference between software RAID5 and Storage Spaces (in Windows 8)? I was planning on switching my N40L over from Ubuntu/ZFS to Windows 8/Storage Spaces, but if I can stick to Win7/Raid5 I'd probably be happier with that. I've got no plans to upgrade the capacity of the pool (it's 4x2tb ==6tb with redundancy at the moment), just hadn't realized you could do software RAID in Windows. I guess the performance is better than Storage Spaces too? The performance of software raid 5 isn't anything special, but its more than enough to stream media to two other computers while my parents watch poo poo on it in the lounge room. It probably also helps that ita one of the other computers which is the sabnzbd machine and handles most of the more intensive work.
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Dec 18, 2012 02:25
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Froist posted:Sorry to keep questioning you, but you seem to have the setup I want Sorry about the wait - had to go and actually have a look at the system to see what OS was on it. It wasn't Win7 - it's a copy of Windows Home Server 2011 (which does support software Raid 5 and is cheap as hell) with XBMC as the front end. And honestly if you were going to the trouble that that workaround mentioned, I'd just say gently caress it and get a cheap 4 or 8 port low profile raid card to go in there to run everything off of.
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Dec 21, 2012 18:25
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. I did a bit of reading around after this and everything I saw implied that Windows 7 removed the RAID 5 option. Are you using a 3rd party RAID software, or is there a different way of getting it working? One of the "workarounds" I saw mentioned was "Install Windows 7 -> Install VirtualBox -> Install linux VM with MDADM -> Give VM access to drives -> Access from Windows via virtual network" which just sounds hideous.
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Ethereal posted:Any compact two drive DIY recommendations? I'm thinking of downsizing my N40L to something smaller. The easiest option would be to just yank out the guts of your N40L and put it in something smaller. If its just the power draw that you're worried about, it isn't too difficult to install a 120w PicoPSU (not sure if the 90w or lower work, but the 120w definitely does) instead of the standard one. Tornhelm fucked around with this message at 06:09 on Mar 19, 2013 |
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Mar 19, 2013 06:05
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Mr Shiny Pants posted:The easy way, get a Synology that can host at least four disks. Giving you Raid 5. Or even better, Grab a Microserver and put XPEnology (pretty much roll-your-own Synology) on it. Pretty much the best of both worlds.
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Jan 2, 2014 11:52
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the_lion posted:What do you mean by best of both worlds? XPEnology is pretty much the Synology operating system, based off of the GPL source code that Synology provides. So when you run it on a Microserver (or any other computer really), you're essentially getting a higher powered NAS for cheaper than if you bought a Synology box for a minimal amount of effort setting it up. If you're using any good NAS (Synology/QNAP/etc) then you don't need to buy all the drives at once, they *should* expand the storage to fit however many drives you have at the time.
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Jan 2, 2014 13:10
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Or you could not mess around and just go straight for the Define XL which supports 10 straight out the gate before adding in the extra cages. Edit: The Arc is nice, its just that like a lot of the Fractal Design cases, they're pretty much just worse versions of the Define series. The Arc is pretty much a Define with less noise reduction/soundproofing. Tornhelm fucked around with this message at 13:45 on Jul 2, 2014 |
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Jul 2, 2014 13:39
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Pudgygiant posted:I really like my ReadyNAS but the first thing I did was send the array as iSCSI to a NUC. It's really solidly built for a glorified / overpriced SAN extension. This, kinda. With the ReadyNAS it all depends on what you want to use it for. I've got two here, one as a file server, the other for backups/crashplan which is fine as long as you're comfortable ssh'ing in to it to set up a headless client on the readynas (and while you're there making sure you change it from the system partition to the storage one).
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Nov 24, 2014 00:06
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Generic Monk posted:silverstone ds380 If you fill one of them out, you tend to get heat/airflow issues unless you leave bays empty. You might as well go for a Fractal Design Node 804 mini atx which does everything the Silverstone does but better.
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Jul 16, 2017 23:38
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I know here in AU at least, the NAS units nearly never go on sale. No real discounts I could see even internationally over an 8-9 month period (including end of financial year & Christmas sales) after my house burnt down and I was waiting until I'd gotten all my other poo poo in order before buying one. I'm guessing its because they're such a niche/specialized item that they don't see the point in discounting them until they're EoL and trying to get rid of excess stock.
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Jun 2, 2019 12:59
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Atomizer posted:I'm not familiar with workstation stuff, and I'm confused by the RAM configuration on that board. What's going on with the "6 channel, 8 DIMM" thing, and the diagram makes it even more confusing. The other two ram slots are for fake RGB ram so it makes you look like you've spent more money than you did.
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Dec 24, 2019 16:57
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Considering the limitations you've given you'll probably have to look at going the DIY route with something like a Raspberry Pi running OpenMediaVault and a couple of external hdd's or a raid enclosure plugged into it.
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Oct 26, 2020 11:19
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w00tmonger posted:My works having an IT auction and I'm looking at grabbing a 12 bay QNAP TS-1270U-RP for backup and storing media etc. QNAP has comparable quality to Synology and from the looks of it, that server is the perfect size to mount onto an Ikea Lack if you use a Lack enclosure. Edit: To go into slightly more detail, QNAP has better hardware, Synology has better software (mainly due to the packages). From memory, QNAP doesn't have anything like Synology Hybrid Raid either, so your storage pool is limited to the size of the smallest drive. Tornhelm fucked around with this message at 17:35 on May 5, 2021 |
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May 5, 2021 17:24
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Rescue Toaster posted:This is for a house-already-burned-down scenario. (It's likely I'd only have one off-site copy if I wasn't at home to grab the newest one on the way out the door.) I'd rather have my backup work but maybe possibly have a bad file or two than 'oops all mount errors' that seems to happen surprisingly often the fancier a filesystem gets. Call me an old boomer curmudgeon or whatever, but my gut instinct when its 'this is the last drive in existence that has the files' I feel like I want something simple and where recovery/scraping tools are common if the main inode tables or whatever have gotten screwed up by a unclean shutdown last time I swapped the backup drive. Anecdotally, your NAS might be surprisingly fire resistant. My old Netgear ReadyNAS 104 was surprisingly still usable after my house burnt down after replacing the power cord. I did only use it to get my stuff off of it, but the drives themselves are still chugging along fine in a new NAS a couple of years later.
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Nov 30, 2021 14:49
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neurotech posted:I just got a Samsung 970 EVO Plus SSD - is there any value in installing the "Samsung Magician" software? Its how you update the firmware on the Samsung SSDs. Unless you're using something like Samsung Rapid (not even sure if that's still a thing anymore) you should probably at least install it at least long enough for that.
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Jun 16, 2022 01:03
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necrobobsledder posted:There really is no ATX non-rack mount mini ITX NAS case out there that does 16 drives, is there? The Fractal Design Node 804 in theory could handle it if there were more 3.5" bay mount points available but shoving that many drives into as small of a case as possible (with adequate cooling, of course) seems like a problem nobody's bothering with because it's basically the wheelhouse of every other enterprise storage vendor. For that many drives, you're pretty much looking for something like the Fractal Define 7 XL. It supports 18x 3.5" drives and is mITX compatible.
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Jul 24, 2023 18:39
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Due to a fun experience with my power company doing some work in the area, I'm looking at having to redo my setup. Are there any obvious pitfalls I should be aware of to getting something like a cheap second hand Dell T330 or T620, sticking unraid on it and setting up the *arrs etc? I know that there can be issues with refurb hard drives and the drive controller (hba?) may need to be flashed/replaced, but not sure if there's anything else I missed. I've got minimal Linux and no docker experience, but I was basically only using my NAS as a file server, so worst case scenario I can run the *arrs etc off of a windows install pointed at the network share if unraid is too much of a pain for me to work out (I really wish there was an easy way to test it in a VM or something without having to commit the hardware). Mainly looking at doing something like this as replacing the Synology box by itself would be as expensive as the ex-server and a bunch of refurb drives.
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Aug 11, 2023 14:51
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Shumagorath posted:QNAP came up last time I posted here and the consensus was they weren't trustworthy. Is there a recommend appliance that will: Maybe a Terramaster box? I know you can switch out their OS for Unraid/TrueNAS and some models have a few nvme slots.
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Jan 29, 2024 04:05
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Shumagorath posted:I mean I can transcode on my gaming PC for about 85W idle, but the idea was to use less power not just expand its storage. Personally, I transcode (using Tdarr) just so I have everything in the same formats/codecs because of my OCD, and Tdarr also keeps track of the health of my files. The benefit of splitting the files/transcoding is when I need to I can just pull out a few NUC's I normally use for other purposes and absolutely tear through the transcode queue by running Tdarr nodes on them as well.
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Jan 29, 2024 05:40
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Gwyneth Palpate posted:Hey, hope the thread doesn't mind a drive-by question from a lurker. I've had the same NAS (and same drives) for going on 10 years, and it's probably time to replace them. I'm not interested in building out a whole PC for them; I'd rather buy something already built. Are Synology NAS and Western Digital drives still good ITYOOL 2024? Should I be aiming for something else? Synology is fine as long as you google the model to make sure there's no glaring issues that mainly apply to the older models - making sure it doesn't suffer from the Atom bug problem and there were a bunch of people reporting the DS918's power supply dying after about 5 years. Edit: TraderStav posted:Thoughts on buying these cheaper refurbished drives? Comments on the links indicate that you do have some higher risk of failure/not getting warranty honored but generally speaking you'll come out ahead with the cheaper $/TB overall even accounting for that. Server Part Deals is legit, and if there's any issues with the drives I haven't heard of any real issues with them honoring the warranty - just the hassle of having to ship the drive back and waiting for a replacement. Tornhelm fucked around with this message at 16:26 on Feb 4, 2024 |
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Feb 4, 2024 16:17
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