I grabbed one of these from amazon uk a little while back, installed the OS to a usb stick cos there's a handy onboard port just inside the front. took an image of the usb stick and tested writing it to another and booting off that as a backup, seems to work fine
nice little unit, flawless so far
I use it mainly as iscsi storage for test vm's that I run on my desktop, also doubles as samba server for some media
I've still got mine sitting at home waiting for me to do something with it.
Lol same and 5 x 2Tb WD Greens (which cost me $84 each at the time). On of the guys at work here mod'd the PSU and fan and has 4 x 3Tb in the bays and 4 x something laptop HDD's in the CD Rom bay ...
I meant 2TB btw (not 2GB), which is what it says in the specs. If it can do more than 2TB then it should be able to go all the way up to 24TB or 60TB or whatever the new maximum capacity is.
I already own 3TB drives, which are incompatible with most of my equipment.
Hmm, alright that makes two of you, I wonder why they keep stating 2TB over and over? Really put me off.
The only other feature I'd prefer a more expensive NAS for is the ability to automatically adjust the raid configuration based on how many drives are in, and allow any drive to be swapped for a larger drive and expand the raid magically into that space. Does it do that?
it's not difficult at all with linux software raid, no you don't have to wipe it/start over but backing up anything important when resizing is a good idea just in case. regardless of what solution you use
Windows Home Server (not 2011) allowed you to do that through drive extender but for WHS 2011 Microsoft removed that functionality. It seems though that they have included it for Windows 8 called Storage Spaces
As for drives, I put the Hitachi 3TB 5400RPM drives in mine. I went for the 5400's instead of teh 7200 as heat and energy efficiency was a higher priority for me than performance.
No free Nas cannot perform online raid expansion and never will be able to.
Buy a decent NAS with a decent web management interface like a QNAP and you can do this and no, you won't have to backup your data before you do it... ever...
I'm running 2x3TB WD Greens (EZRX's from memory) and 2x 3TB Hitachi Deskstars (7k3000's)
Windows only saw them as 2TB partitions, but you change the disk type to MBT from GUID it sees all 3TB (appears as 2.7 :D)
so I might suggest starting there Thermite... unless it's the BIOS that isn't seeing them as 3TBs (in which case a firmware update)
and in my current build I'm dabbling with 'Storage Pooling' using an application called 'Drive Bender'.
As most of the content is expendable (ie if I lost it I could re-download/sneaker-net it) I'm not interested in losing 1/4 of my max capacity to RAID for redundancy, instead, using this application, I can literally nominate a folder (so, my photo's for example) and tell Drive bender to duplicate this folder on all four disks.
Maximising flexibility is the game, and thus far Drive Bender is a gem!
last time I checked gamer, a QNAP that had capable RAID and 4x disk capacity cost 3-4 times as much as one of these.
There are 'alternatives' to running RAID, it really depends on your needs (or wants) from such a device.
My housemate is running one of these as a HTPC and it's capable and quiet (tho blu-tacing over the bright HP logo is recommended) and I'm using mine primarily for storage, but as a little media server (w/12TB of space).
I thoroughly rate the QNAP's for what they are, but we're talking a completely different price point.
Not again they aren't... they're *somehwhat* recovered from the Thailand flood... 3TB Hitachi's are ~$170 atm...
WD 2TB's still aren't a great price... $130 (~150+% their 'pre-flood' price...)
(Prices sourced from staticice)
I am still cheering I got the two 3TB WD greens for $120 each tho! (just pre-flood, and admittedly, they aren't warranted as I popped the disks out of the 3.5" USB 2 enclosures the came in...
As much as some dislike Seagate, at least they warrant their HDD's (provide you don't open the actual disk).
No free Nas cannot perform online raid expansion and never will be able to.
why will it never be able to?
Yeah I don't really need that, it just sounds like a really convenient feature. But hardly worth paying 3-4 times the price.
doesn't matter, was just gamer dribble as usual anyway
qnap's use linux software raid so buying a qnap gives you no additional protection against data loss while doing an online expansion over a microserver running linux software raid. the difference is the qnap gives you a html interface to do it - but it's not like mdadm is complicated or undocumented. it's very easy to use
I've resized partitions/filesystems/linuxraid online several times and never had data loss from it yet, but the fact that the userland tools warn you in capital letters that you should back up your data as there's a risk of losing it, indicates to me that it's a possible risk. so if you have some important data on the array, you should back it up before you resize or migrate it
No free Nas cannot perform online raid expansion and never will be able to.
why will it never be able to?
FreeNAS (that is, the free software product of that name) is based on FreeBSD and uses ZFS. I cant figure out if it supports the equivalent of "mdadm --grow" that linux-based systems can do, although given all the "ZFS is awesome!" stuff you see around, you would think it could...
Also, what the hell did you do with all the data to be able to reformat!?
I didnt like Freenas found that SAMBA would sometimes die/crash and so would SABNZB, also i want to do more with my server then just basic freenas stuff, eg plex media server and down track try other things. i only had 1.6TB used on the drive so i moved around on external drives i have and also borrowed some from work :)
I have QNAP's at home and a lot of people have brought in these from work, fantastic little device that will do pretty much everything the qnap will do if you configure it properly.
The implementation of ZFS in freenas does not support autoexpand pool from memory think you need at least v28 upwards for it
It is possible to swap a drive to a larger drive and resilver (repair) the zpool. If this procedure is repeated for every disk in a vdev, then the zpool will grow in capacity when the last drive is resilvered.
Configuration at work 4x750GB raidz pool then my rpool is on 2x250GB mirror I can drop new drives in and resilver them but I have to upgrade the entire pool.
At home the configuration is different currently its 4x2TB 1x250GB on a BR10i which I need to rebuild if I want my proper configuration which will be. 6x2TB RAIDz2 os on USB 2x SSD for L2arc and ZIL
Its running on Solairs Express 11 with NAPP-IT which owns for my needs. And its all rsync'd to my clearOS server which runns 6x1TB lvm raid 5
Its a shame the BR10i does not support 3TB drives =( I could buy an LSI2008 based card to replace it easier enough though. Its easy for me to say all of this though since I have backups living on two other servers and some people don't have that luxury
I have to say running ZFS on the microservers has been awesome so far but really I would like to run some bigger vdev 16+ in a norco and sell up the microservers to fund it
I wouldn't bother looking at freenas again. Outgrown it and anything tricky I prefer to run on clearos / centos since I know bugger all about unix really
yeh but my point is, how does that mean that it 'will never support' ? I mean, isn't it extremely common for software to get upgraded and have additional features added to it? particularly features that alternate solutions already support?
More than likely the snails pace that the project is running on, then there is the forks and disruptions to the project.
There is also the fact that its running version 15 of ZFS and newer versions of zfs support allot of the shit that people of moaning about. Add to this the cuntbags at orcale won't release post v30 code ever, and implementation of later versions of ZFS on freenas may never see the light of day for this reason.
Hence it never will... on freenas. But it does on other platforms
More than likely the snails pace that the project is running on, then there is the forks and disruptions to the project.
There is also the fact that its running version 15 of ZFS and newer versions of zfs support allot of the shit that people of moaning about. Add to this the cuntbags at orcale won't release post v30 code ever, and implementation of later versions of ZFS on freenas may never see the light of day for this reason.
Hence it never will... on freenas. But it does on other platforms
This was my thinking when I commented.
So I'm still waiting to get mine. Currently thinking Ubuntu will go on it. Any advantage to CentOS/ClearOS?
What's the best, newb friendly OS to put on these things, all I want it to do is work - doesn't need any fancy stats, or tracking or monitoring etc.
Disk speed doesn't even need to be super fast, I'll be dumping a bunch of data on it initially and then there will be some incremental data dumps but nothing major.
Should I even bother with *nix or look at windows options?
No idea what I've bought, but I assume the N36L. Both are suited to those tasks.
Just keep in mind it's not a friendly NAS off the shelf like a QNAP or one of the simpler Netgear ReadyNAS options which are all set up, ready to go with nice web-server menus to manage drives and so on - it will take a bit of setting up.
No idea what I've bought, but I assume the N36L. Both are suited to those tasks.
Just keep in mind it's not a friendly NAS off the shelf like a QNAP or one of the simpler Netgear ReadyNAS options
The N40 has a newer CPU('0.2GHz faster from memory) and as a 'stock option' seems to come with 2GB of RAM (instead of 1GB in the N36).
Not a HUGE difference so I wouldn't lose sleep if you've got a N36 in the mail.
And Pinky, whilst you're correct in saying 'there's a bit of setting up to do' it's by no means dramatic.
The benefit in the 'burden of setting it up yourself' is that you can choose what it's capable of, or not as the case may be.
I recommend a Half height nVidia GT210 as a minimum for a video card if you want to use it as a HTPC. You'll get your Audio AND video from the HDMI port on the back. It works well, but has a few minor limitations.
n.b. tread carefully when choosing a video card for them. If it doesn't have HDMI out you'll need to buy a PCIe 1x Sound card to suit. Also steer clear of 'passive cooling' video cards as the heatsinks are usually waaaaaaaay too big for the room in that case.
There's a very extensive set of threads over at the "Overclockers Australia"(OCAU) forum, called something along the lines of 'The HP Microserver Owner's club' and much the same plenty of chatter on Whirlpool about a WIDE variety of setups, and quick/simple mods to boost the capacities of this versatile, cheap platform.
And Pinky, whilst you're correct in saying 'there's a bit of setting up to do' it's by no means dramatic.
Yeah, you're right.
I did think this when considering my post later. For the mentioned uses you could chuck FreeNAS on and call it a day - it's not exactly an insurmountable obstacle!
Yours said "waiting for payment" and you still received it before I did :(
Yeah, that's why I want to put mine under the house. Going to try one of those dust bags, haha. Not holding my breath but I've read a fair few posts from people who have used them successfully.
I find it to be a very quiet unit though, there's no way in hell I can hear it over my desktop's video card fan, in fact when I did the setup on it I sat it in the loungeroom and used the tv as a monitor cos I didn't want to hijack my computer's monitor - and it was actually even quieter than the zotac I use as a htpc, even when the disks are being used
I know what you mean about huge compared to the internet pics, it's easy to get the wrong idea - but given that it has 5 drive bays and is a robust build, it's not a huge system at all - quite compact.
Pretty easy to get a sense of the scale from the optical drive slot/region. For all it's functions, I don't think that I'd want it to be any smaller in volume, but perhaps it would be better if it was a bit shorter in height and longer in depth so that it would fit into more tv units.
Would also be good if there was a version without the optical drive space I suppose. I actually have a dvd drive in mine, but I think I've used it maybe twice.
Anyone checked how much power it draws while idling?
Nah, but I have a thingy to do that and it's on my to-do list. My ReadyNAS NV+ draws about 45W max, for reference, but can idle at 36W for lengthy periods for some reason - maybe some power saving feature, I have no idea.
installing the o/s onto a usb stick works fine, the server will boot a little slower (mine still boots quite quickly) than a faster drive, and intensive disk operations (on the usb stick of course, not on the hard drives) will be slower - for example, if I do package updates, the rpm processing and extraction is noticeably slower than it would be if I installed to a hdd instead of the usb stick.
However, most things you log in to do are no different because they're done in memory, not directly off the usb stick - imo installing to a usb stick is a really good option. And it's easy to turn it off, remove the stick and take an image of it as a backup in case the usb stick shits itself.
As for help installing ubuntu on a usb stick, there's several good articles on it in the ubuntu community - google
thanks jim, so what i just did was mount the ISO on 4gb usb stick then did install on the 16gb disk, seems to running its a little slow i installed ubuntu desktop and not server as i wanted the GUI
yeh if you're going to be using the server as a desktop type thing and hitting the o/s disk a lot (the usb stick) you might not like it so much
in my case, it's a samba/iscsi server only - it has linux on it and no gui at all. it's rarely rebooted and the o/s rarely changes, so it hardly ever uses the usb stick once booted up, other than some minor logging
Anyone checked how much power it draws while idling?
It uses 3W when in stand-by mode (i.e., if you want it sitting there waiting for Wake-on-LAN operation) and 33W running in the default config (one 250GB HDD and no video card or other peripherals).
pretty much just wanna run plex, sabnzb couch potato and sick beard
usb stick should still be ok, but I would probably recommend having that software keep their databases on your array, not on the usb stick - might get a bit annoying waiting for the slow usb i/o when updating/browsing your media library or that type of thing
i wouldn't run anything more than a freenas type install off a usb stick, i tried running debian etch off mine and it was pretty painful
Plex is fairly intensive with its media manager database so I would avoid it, just stick it on its own OS drive if you have one laying around
I just threw a 5th drive in where the optical drive would otherwise go
over on OCAU there are a few guys who have bought a bracket for the 5 1/4" drive bay that allows them to hook up a slim optical drive and 2x 2.5" HDD's (unsure how they're running the two extra SATA devices, prolly a PCIe 1x Sata controller)
for what it is, the flexibility of the platform is quite impressive. I couldn't reasonably recommend a NAS to someone so long as these are available (aside from hooking my non-nerdy mates by recommending Routers that support a USB Storage device.)
When I turn it on with the 1333MHz RAM the "HP" light on the front flashes red once (instead of blue) and it doesn't post. The network light flashes though as normal and the power stays on.
According to this and the brief brochure provided with the server that light is the "Health LED" and can show blue, amber or red. Red is critical system issue.
Nah, it's pretty clear it just doesn't work with 'registered' memory :( I found this post in German:
Im "HP ProLiant MicroServer Installationsblatt" steht auf Seite 5 unter "Richtlinien zur Installation von Speichermodulen" als erster Punkt: "Verwenden Sie nur von HP unterstützte ungepufferte ECC DDR3 DIMMs mit einer Kapazität von 1, 2 oder 4 GB."
Der HP MicroServer N36L unterstützt keinen "registered" Speicher, darum bekommst du auch kein Bild.
Ok dudes - I want to take Jim's approach and put a USB key in the internal slot on the mobo. I need to buy a USB key though - what's the go with speeds these days? Can someone recommend me a suitable USB key?
I got this lexar echo xz, not sure if it's any good, they wrote some speeds on the packet so I guess they were proud of it. I just like that it's small incase there is a space issue or it winds up having to plug into the front.
Ok dudes - I want to take Jim's approach and put a USB key in the internal slot on the mobo. I need to buy a USB key though - what's the go with speeds these days? Can someone recommend me a suitable USB key?
at the time of purchasing that key it was one of the faster ones
I still wouldn't recommend it unless you're doing very little i/o or interactive things with it
if its just sitting in the background processing something or other, like a nas box, it'll be fine
With transfer rates of 34MBps and 28MBps for reads and writes
Still haven't quite decided what to do with this yet, whether to use it as my backup strategy for my existing 10TB of primary storage on external drives, or to actually extend my primary storage onto it. I don't think I can deprecate any of my current external drives as they're attached to the computers that use them the most and those computers are on a wireless g network which sucks and nothing I can do about that till I move later in the year.
When they say you can 'put up to four Gigabit ethernet ports' into it - why would you do that? Can you somehow have four ethernet ports on say two computers and hence transfer data at four times the speed (or whatever less, subsequent to the laws of physics)?
you can aggregate nics into teams/bonds/channels to achieve greater-than-single-nic speeds yeh, but with certain limitations and caveats, depending on the configuration you go with
there's two main ways I'm aware of to do it:
- switch-assisted, where the switch requires configuration in conjunction with the nic driver configuration (such as 802.3ad)
- various modes of non switch-assisted
nearly all of them will never allow you to get greater than a single nic's worth of speed for a single tcp conversation though - however these are still very useful for situations where you have a one-to-many scenario such as a data server with multiple clients connecting. the server could have several gbit nics in it, and each client could theoretically get gbit speeds from the server at once (one client via each nic) and distribution across the server nics is typically done with some sort of hash/xor of the mac, or ip, or ip+port depending on which configuration you choose
the only way (that I'm aware) of getting a single tcp conversation to traverse multiple nics at the 'same' time is to use the linux bonding driver in round-robin mode, where each nic will continually be arping, causing the packets to continually go in and out of different nics. this mode breaks the IEEE standard I think, due to packets potentially arriving out of order. actually some of the 802.3ad settings break the 802.3ad standard for the same reason as well, I think
I've done a LOT of testing of the various modes prior to our launching the mammothvps platform - it was of particular interest to us so we could hopefully achieve good iscsi speed with low-cost hardware. unfortunately the round-robin mode seemed to make the netgear switches we were using at the time, cranky and misbehave after some time so we ended up doing away with it and reverted to a combination of active/passive nic teams, and 802.3ad/etherchannel and gave up on trying to get greater-than-gbit for a single connection. it can possibly be done with the right combination of switches and configuration settings but it was more important for us to just be rid of issues and revert to something a bit simpler for the sake of network stability. it's a shame, cos initial tests using ipperf showed us maxing out a team of 4 gbit nics with a single tcp session, from multiple clients to/from a server with 10 gbit nics in it - so assuming we ever had a server with the i/o to max that out, we'd have potentially had a nice setup
oh and I forgot another probably more common reason for teaming nics - high-availability
we've been doing this for many years now with active/backup mode (other modes do provide HA too though), having each nic wired to a different switch in a switch stack - the object there being if a nic/cable/switch dies, the host doesn't lose network connectivity because the driver monitors the links and upon failure of the active nic, switches to the backup - usually with nothing but a brief pause in network traffic
this has been very reliable for us, practically trouble-free - with the linux bonding driver, and also the hp and intel drivers on windows
OK well I've found a small IKEA tool that might unscrew that fucking hard drive.
One thing I didn't think of, is keyboard mouse and monitor. How are you guys working around this problem?
Ideally I wouldn't want to attach a keyboard, mouse, or monitor. I want to walk up to it like Rodney McKay with a tablet, and somehow tap tap tap, things get done.
thermite, what O/S did you install? Should be able to disable the 'no keyboard' issue if your server isn't starting up.
If you really need to administer it with a GUI rather than via SSH then install VNC as teq suggests.
Just some info - I installed latest Ubuntu on my mine onto the 250GB HDD it came with (from a USB key) and then moved that drive to the optical drive bay using a mount bracket, and installed 4x 1GB drives into the HDD bays and the thing booted straight up into Ubuntu no drama at all. I.e., No BIOS update as I wrote above (maybe these ones have the updated BIOS is my guess).
Edit: I'm using same approach as Jim. Mine is sitting inside a cupboard tucked away.
I bought a logi K400 (link below) from officejerks pricematching (-5%).
I typically use it as a remote device but if I *need* keyb/mouse, I plug in the unifying adapter this comes with, and bam, keyboard and mouse.
Word of warning to others... the 'scratch pad' on the k400 feels like an old laptop... if I had to suggest an all-in-one option to use day to day, this wouldn't be it.
oh wow I still didn't spot the row of screws at the bottom. I have very poor lighting.
Even when you said there's a tool in the door, I took a quick glance, nope, and proceeded to open up the whole box and starting poking my fingers everywhere trying to find a little plastic bag or something containing the tool.
I'm not even gonna say how long it took me to figure out that the lever goes down AFTER you push the drive in, I thought the sata things at the back were bent.
you guys probably already explained, but what are you using this for? i'm tempted to get one as a nas/media centre solution but still need more convincing.
oh wow I still didn't spot the row of screws at the bottom. I have very poor lighting.
Farkn candles eh? Romantic though.
you guys probably already explained, but what are you using this for? i'm tempted to get one as a nas/media centre solution but still need more convincing.
I'm using mine in a 2TB RAID-1 (mirroring) config just as a fileserver for work files. Lower power option than firing up our main server which is used for analysis.
As a NAS it's a cheap option. Would definitely recommend. Just chuck a few 7200rpm drives in it and away you go.
I am looking to grab one of these quick smart - is there a store I can walk-in and grab one or do I need to use megabuy and wait for delivery? Need one operational quick smart so I dont want to wait for delivery etc etc.
I think mine took around 4 days andrewus. Wouldn't buy if you're in a hurry - they have quite a bit of negative publicity regarding delivery. My experience was top notch though.
31/01/2012 Confirming Payment Order has been Received, Waiting to Confirm Payment
31/01/2012 Processing Payment Received and Confirmed. Processing Order
Ordered today before lunch. With any luck they stick to the 1 - 3 day delivery and it shall be in my hands by weeks end. .. With any luck.
Yeah North Lakes is easily a 2 day drive from Strathpine - Ill go with thursday also haha.
Can I clear something up, their website says they use a courier. So I NEED to be home to receive it correct? And if I shoot out and miss them.. anyone aware of the follow up procedure?
Yeah I ordered something else from megabuy on thursday and it arrived today (a bit slow imo) and i'm same distance from strathpine as you andrewus. they use star trek as their couriers - and i rolled up home at the same time as the guy was about to leave - with leaving me a note and not the package.
ahh been out all day as I assumed delivery tomorrow. Missed the courier who in fact did come today. How depressing lol.
Now I have to contact him during work hours to arrange delivery time. jmr up a fiver for picking the winning bet of wednesday!
yeah i'm pretty bad at this. looking for a simple os/software to make one a file server, download centre, (sabnzbd, bitorrent, etc.) and possibly a print server.
This one is just for a customer for basic backups so I will be rolling win7 on it for ease of use for them. Simple for the customer hopefully equals simple for me!
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