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HP Proliant Microserver FAO Neo_VR

DaveI
in The Technology Shed

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Going to order one tomorrow and was wondering if you could answer some questions?

HP quote a 'half height' optical drive for the top bay, would a normal 5.25 drive fit?

How loud is it, I have my current WHS on the shelf above my head in a home built box and it's a bit loud. Is the HP fairly quiet?

What are you doing with the RAM you took out? ;)

5.25" half height, is a standard drive

Really wish I'd not just bought a 4-disk NAS now, having seen this and the cashback! Ah well emoticon-0114-dull.gif

  • Author

Cheers for the replies.

After reading some reviews it appears that a normal CD drive will fit but the HP ones are slightly shorter giving greater room for the connecting cables and airflow.

Half Height does seem a strange description, I was envisaging some sort of HP proprietary drive mid point between a laptop size and normal 5.25.

If that's the case, I'd probably connect up a standard one, install WHS and then disconnect it again. That's probably all you'll end up needing it for :)

Cheers for the replies.

..Half Height does seem a strange description, I was envisaging some sort of HP proprietary drive mid point between a laptop size and normal 5.25.

Full height goes back to a time when a standard 5MEG disk drive was 3 1/2" high.

Full height goes back to a time when a standard 5MEG disk drive was 3 1/2" high.

Bingo :)

Ditto for full height 3.5" disks being half height too.

Really wish I'd not just bought a 4-disk NAS now, having seen this and the cashback! Ah well emoticon-0114-dull.gif

Out of interest, which NAS did you buy? I'm currently looking into upgrading my current Atom HTPC (which also does storage), so far my options are:

1) Buy a proper NAS, cram it with disks, and keep my current HTPC for video playback

2) Buy one of these Microservers, cram it with disks, and keep my current HTPC for the video playback

3) Replace the whole lot with a Microserver with discrete VDPAU capable graphics card (for offloaded HD MKV playback through XBMC) and somehow shoehorn an OS disk as well as a DVD drive in.

The Microserver is bloody aggressively priced with the cashback, but would probably be the most work, so I'm looking around for decent NAS devices preferably with recommendations, cos some of the cheap ones I looked at a few years back were totally dire...

Out of interest, which NAS did you buy?

Went with a StarTech S354UFER. Took a bit of a punt TBH, so will see how things work out with my proposed plans :)

Going to order one tomorrow and was wondering if you could answer some questions?

HP quote a 'half height' optical drive for the top bay, would a normal 5.25 drive fit?

How loud is it, I have my current WHS on the shelf above my head in a home built box and it's a bit loud. Is the HP fairly quiet?

What are you doing with the RAM you took out? ;)

As above the cdrom drive is a "normal" size drive bay but try get a shorter drive for easier fit.. or get a caddy and you can add 2 more SATA drives (theres a hacked bios that can turn the CDROM port into a full AHCI port as its gimped from the factory)

Errm.. its not loud.. but its not whisper-quiet either. it has like a low-pitch hum.. probably sort that by messing with the rear-fan a bit (big 120mm one). basically its not something thatll sit in your front room.

Ive been messing round with mine loads at the mo.. currently running WHS 2011 (£37 legit!!!) with 8gb ram (under £40) and VMWare server over the top running a couple of Netapp sim's.

Ive got a gig switch on order.. the internetz seem to rekon ill get pretty much wirespeed in this config.. not finalised what to do with the 2x2gb hdd's yet.. ive heard the on-board raid is a bit limp and hurts performance.

As for the memory, its been earmarked as my dad has just bought two lol.

If that's the case, I'd probably connect up a standard one, install WHS and then disconnect it again. That's probably all you'll end up needing it for :)

This is exactly what i did..

  • Author

Thanks for the replies!

I checked on the RAM and the basic stick is ECC I believe, 8GB was running at about £85.00 so it's good to hear I can just stick the cheaper stuff in.

I did read about a minimum CPU speed check halting WHS2011 installs on the Microserver, did you run into this or am I reading stuff from the Beta release? :)

Cheers.

Thanks for the replies!

I checked on the RAM and the basic stick is ECC I believe, 8GB was running at about £85.00 so it's good to hear I can just stick the cheaper stuff in.

I did read about a minimum CPU speed check halting WHS2011 installs on the Microserver, did you run into this or am I reading stuff from the Beta release? :)

Cheers.

Think it might have been beta.. ive not had any issues so far

One Q on the WHS2011 from CCL Col - is that OEM or can it be ordered on its own? :)

  • Author

One Q on the WHS2011 from CCL Col - is that OEM or can it be ordered on its own? :)

Ordered it today, no need for any other hardware purchase.

Ordered the HP, 4GB of RAM and a 2TB disk today as well, hopefully it all turns up tomorrow at work and I can build it there and then.

It will sort of look like work :)

  • Author

WHS 2011 is the OEM version but they don't make you buy anything else.

Everything turned up today, the HP server is a little chunky fella. Properly well built with some cool little touches like the screws and tool on the back of the door.

Just moving the data from my WHS 2008 to my new WHS 2011 box now.

Exciting Friday night in!

As you'll probably see inside you need to do a bit of cabling to get a sata optical drive in there, you need to run a sata cable down to the front of the motherboard and get a connector to use the four pin molex into the sata power connector.

I've had my Microserver for a few months now and I think it's a brilliant bargain and would still be reasonable value for money at the £230 odd full price. I've had WHS v1 running on mine which has worked without issue (bar esata not working), the purpose designed case is pretty good although mine seems to have quite a bit of dust on it. I'm tempted to try WHS 2011 but the big issue is losing the WHS v1 client backups, I can redo most of them but one of them is for a rebuilt machine so I can't reimage it.

John

  • 5 months later...

*bump*

Ive just bought another... this time a N40L - with a slightly faster (1.5 instead of 1.3ghz) cpu and an extra gig of ram as standard.

This one is for an ESX lab as employers are going to pay for me to get VCP5 :) so itll be ESX within ESX lol.

Different type of processor I think as well, closer to the normal Athlon than the ultra-low power one before it. Does it affect the power consumption/noise output much?

Yep, that's the one I bought. Seems to run along just fine. I stuck 8GB in mine.

Overall noise level is fine IMO - I have mine sat in my front room behind the TV and it's not intrusive.

Have fun Col emoticon-0148-yes.gif

I bought one the other week too - just waiting for HDD prices to come down now.

I have it sitting in the living room behind the TV on top of my HTPC (only place i can get ethernet to at the moment) and you can only hear it if the TV is off.

Running WSH2011 with Sabnzbd, Sickbeard and couchpotato......Downloaded 147gb in a week so far!

need more RAM though as it sometimes crawls.

Yep, that's what I want to buy one for, to replace my ION box (which is nice, but storage is on USB2 disks and one of them is dying a bit. So good to know the faster, better CPU hasn't bumped the noise up cos I wouldn't want it any noisier than my current box.

I bought one the other week too - just waiting for HDD prices to come down now.

.....

need more RAM though as it sometimes crawls.

Ditto, would like to add another 2TB drive to mine. Prices seem to have come down slightly, but nothing like they should be, or were, earlier in 2011.

As for RAM, I went for this. Recommended by a few other N40L users (over on AVForums IIRC) and it does the job nicely. Least RAM is pretty good value at the moment!

http://www.dabs.com/...m-cl9-7JJL.html

Cheers,

Steve

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