Storage The HP Micro Server Thread

Hey all,

Noticed that the £100 cashback offer has extended till the end of Nov.

Has anyone got one of these? How do they handle?

I want to use it as a media file server, and I currently have all my media sitting on a 1TB HD that I am using in an external caddie.

It's £240 before cashback at eBuyer: eBuyer Link

Might be just what I need, but like to run it past the wonderful peeps here first!

 

Loads of us have one and think its great, including me! If you want to upgrade the RAM it works fine with non ECC memory.

 

Couldn't recommend them more highly, fantastic pieces of kit not to mention the price, just recieved my £100 cash back cheque at the end of last week (which took a while) but very pleased with it overall.

 

Sweet. Thanks all!

 

It's a nice machine. Pics and paragraph about it > http://mcompute.co.uk/showthread.php?tid=1129
I'm running FreeNAS on mine.

 

Just for reference, is it just a case of sending the invoice in the package to them?

 

Yes, it is fine for the price. Even when i paid 240 euros for it (1 euro for 250GB hard drive, 1 euro for Windows Server 2008 Foundation, the rest for the Microserver N40 version with the DVD drive).

I disliked the fan noise a bit, but modifying any PWM fan for microserver is not hard at all :
http://www.silentpcreview.com/article1193-page7.html
In short - you take out all the pins, move the last one to the first and move every other by one pin. Did it easily with my Enermax Cluster. One thing to keep in mind - 550RPM is probably the minimum acceptable fan speed for Microserver if you are thinking about swapping the fan.

 

Ebuyer didn't include an invoice for me but it was just a case of printing one of the website that included the VAT no I think it was as well as a picture of the product page on the ebuyer website then sending that lot to HP, received my check after about 43 days.

 

What OS are people running on these? I'm tempted to get one as a backup NAS for work, can I run free NAS or something similar on it? are the drives hot swappable?

 

All SATA drives are hot swappable.

 

I must say, i'm more and more tempted by one of these.

Sam

 

according to this, it's not?

 

One of the main advantages SATA has over IDE is the native hot swapping. I've pulled a drive and degraded my RAID array in this thing, popped it back in and it re-build fine mwuahha!

 

I think what they mean is that you cannot put there hot plug drives you can buy from HP, but you need to use the bracket and screws provided by microserver = not hot-plug.

This is the hot plug drive from HP:
http://web.tradekorea.com/upload_file2/sell/15/S00011715/Hard_Disk_Drive_432341_B21.jpg

Non-hot plug = bracket + screws + standard drive.

It doesn't change the fact, that the port itself is hotplug - but the tray for drives is not the "HP Hot Plug" compatible.

Hope it makes sense .

 

All SATA is electrically hotswappable (i.e. you won't fry anything) but it's only actually hotswappable if the bios/sata controller bios can handle it. The microserver cannot, you have to reboot for the drive to show up unless it is the same model/same drive that was on that port before.

I have 3 Microservers, love them. Put 8 2tb drives in two, the third is my main pc while I upgrade. It even runs battlefield play4free! All you need is a usb sound card and it's a great desktop.

Great as a NAS, cheaper than an actual NAS yet faster, more flexible. Very good build quality, reasonably quiet. The only down-side is the half-height expansion slots, and it can't quite handle 1080p (720 is fine).

 

I love mine, got it running 4x2tb drives, and blueray drive and a boot ssd and 8gb of ram with a gt250, its a fantastic media server!

 

Just a small followup to my 4-pin PWM fan modification - there is one even better and easier choice (tested today). Grab a 3-pin fan extension and remove the guides on the end which goes to the motherboard. Put it on the first 3 pins of the HP microserver fan connector, so you will keep the one which is most deep in the case without connection. That is the control pin, we don't need that. The remaining pins lined up exactly as 3-pin fans need, so once you connected the 3-pin fan extension cable, you are free to connect a 3-pin fan or fan speed regulator on the other end of the extension cable. The only limit you will have is that your fan can't go slower than 550RPM. This way you will ignore the built in fan speed regulation, you can have fixed fan speed, which is often a better choice for noise.

 

I bought one last week, still haven't got it out the box yet....

 

get it out the box asap, i love mine to bits.

Combined with a low profile nvidia G210 and a blu-ray drive it makes an awesome HTPC. The Neo CPU is bloody good for such a low clock speed it surprised the hell out of me, makes an atom look silly

 

Hi folks,

This looks ideal for my needs. I use a NAS to stream media content to my hifi and WDTV Live, as well as a backup for photos and documents; currently I use Asset uPnP for the audio streaming and TwonkyMedia 6 for video. Does anyone know if this product will support these media server applications? Also, could I connect a printer to this so that any networked computers in my house could print?

Still available with £100 cashback by the way...

Cleggy.