This particular bit of hardware can be had for £119.99 after cashback from Ebuyer at the moment. I'm wondering if anyone here has one or has any experience with one? Despite the lack of a hard drive it looks like a solid bit of kit for the price. Long term I imagine it could house a Xeon (I think) to make it a bit more beefy and I have seen some people do it so I'm pretty keen. What do y'all think?
They seem to be very popular, never bought one myself though as I don't really need a server. I'd imagine that even with the Celeron it'd do more than you'd ever need it to do once you've plugged some drives in...
What are you planning to do with it? I have one running some nas software and it works perfectly fine for that purpose. I have an old colleague that has two setup at home as an esx cluster home lab. Only "drawback" of the gen 8 is ecc memory is required so no cheap memory upgrades. There was talk that the gen 8s are louder than gen 7s but I have noticed myself.
ECC is required? Damn, was hoping that wouldn't be the case. I was thinking of having one for an EXSi home lab eventually but probably use one as a NAS.
If you have a NAS, and aren't using ECC, you're gambling with your data. Any sort of data storage appliance not using ECC is a Bad Idea.
Ah yes, if I started using it as a NAS I'd keep the 4GB ECC it comes with. I was thinking more for a homelab.
Whilst I agree in principle, certainly for NAS devices, that's a bit of a leap isn't it? That would include every USB Drive or consumer PC for that matter.
I have a 7th Generation and EEC is not required. I'm using 8GB of old PC RAM. http://www.alphr.com/hp/32483/hp-proliant-microserver-gen8-review It has a Celeron CPU and the RAM specs are listed as 'DDR3'. I think you might be OK. With regards to my 7th Gereration, it uses a Turion dual core CPU. I'm running Linux Mint as a headless server controlled using Team Viewer. It runs Plex and Crashplan. I've also got VMWare player running another instance of Linux for a VPN/Transmission. I'd highly recommend this line of servers. It is a great bit of kit and well worth £120.
ECC RAM is not required on most of the Microservers, but argument is that if you're using it as a NAS then the error detection feature of ECC becomes much more important. Unfortunately, the particular flavour of ECC memory required by HP Microservers ain't cheap. I'd dearly love 8GB for mine, but it'll cost me more than the server did.
I think you need to decide how much your data is 'worth'. Mine has TV, films and crashplan backups. All important data on there (not too bothered if I lose the videos) is on my desktop and my laptop. If the server went bad, it wouldn't be too big a problem for me - unless it went bad at the exact moment my laptop and desktop also lost all their data - somewhat unlikely. The fact it is located in my house, means it isn't a 'true' backup anyway (fire, theft, etc). If you're using a microserver as the sole repository of important data, you probably need to have a rethink about what you'd do if the server was stolen.
