I have a question which someone may be able to answer before my own unit shows up. Is there room inside for a microSATA SSD which is basically a bare PCB? I have one such Samsung drive from an old Dell laptop which I'm currently using in my desktop PC (with a microSATA to SATA adaptor so it takes standard connections). I'm wondering whether this would be discreet enough to fit into a Microserver chassis without taking up a drive bay (this would then hold the OS leaving me all 4 hot-swap bays for storage and the optical bay for future optical use). The SSD isn't blazingly fast, but it's fast enough and big enough to host the Linux/FreeBSD installation I intend to put on it, and it would be really nice if I could keep all 4 bays purely for storage as it makes adding/swapping storage drives much easier in the future...

Yes:

It's on top of the fan, although not very visible.

A bad photo, but there should be clearance to leave one on top of the ODD too.

Helpful? A full 2.5inch SSD fits without issues. . .

Edited 6 February, 201313 yr by TriggerFish

Interesting. Might do that with mine

Not thought about an SSD for it before.......

Nor had I, but that one's kicking around spare. I still didn't think of using it for that until your post!

I'e only just made the connection it could be used . .

Cool. If a 2.5" SSD fits then the 1.8" mSATA one I have should fit. Just need to find a way of securing it given that it's a bare PCB with no case...yes, it's a bodge, but hey ho! I'm likely to be running ZFS with whatever OS I install, so I'm keen to keep the hotswappable drives just for storage then it's a case of setting up a mirror with the drives I have in two bays, then simply sending the filesystem over to two bigger disks in the other two bays when it's full. And then optionally back again having taken the original two useless disks out. Much less complicated if I can keep the OS on a separate drive and it looks like even if the SSD can't be fitted, I can put one of my spare 2.5" regular drive and keep the OS/data separate that way. Quite looking forward to finally getting hold of one, and at 85 quid after the cashback is processed, I'm laughing

Do you guys have the "hacked" bios to enable full-speed on the extra SATA ports?

Mine's only a 36, so nope. :( Wish I had an N40 for that though.

Mine's only a 36, so nope. :( Wish I had an N40 for that though.

The bios works on the N36 too - ive just done it this evening

Awesome! Looks like I'll be doing that some time soon.

Thanks!

Awesome! Looks like I'll be doing that some time soon.

Thanks!

The link in my post worked for me.. only fail (on my part) was only renaming the "real" bios file and putting the new one in its place, instead of deleting the old one totally.

The script to flash the bios was written to cope with long filenames so will match the first 6 chars. in my case despite renaming (i usually just append "old" to the end of the filename") the script still picked up the original/renamed bios.

Yeah, I made the same mistake, easily fixed though.

I mounted an SSD in the 5.25" bay and boot my OS (Debian) off that.

I was tempted by that, but as I'm planning on using it as a media centre, I'm going to need to fit an optical drive at some point too. Mine arrived last week, and the extra RAM arrived earlier this week so with careful application of a small strip of double-sided tape I've now got a 2.5" laptop HD fastened in above the fan and cabled into the SATA port on the motherboard. Won't be particularly fast or resilient to knocks but it's pretty much just to hold a copy of FreeBSD and will be rebooted only rarely so I can live with it. Just need to juggle some disks around and make the actual storage array now. I'm quite impressed with these little boxes, they feel like quality products, only minor complaint I have is that some of the cabling is a bit awkward, there's a bit of pressure on my USB connectors which means they're being pushed slightly to the side. It's probably my fault in the way I've put everything back together, but the tolerances for the cabling must be insanely tight. Once I've finished dismantling/remantling it though I'm sure it'll be fine.

Playing with an N40 at the moment as well, with the £100 cashback couldn't leave one on the shelf.

Currently testing it using 4 Samsung 320GB SATA drives I had spare, with the 2GB stock RAM and a 2GB USB memory stick on the internal USB port running NAS4FREE.

Seems to be running it very well.

Yeah, I considered USB boot when I found it had an internal port. Still might if I can find a decent sized USB drive laying around, but I don't think 2 gigs will be enough to run everything I want to (FreeBSD plus ports plus XBMC) and I dunno what numerous software compilations would do for the lifetime of it. I had the laptop drive laying around and shortly will have a smallish proper SSD spare when I get around to ordering a new one for my desktop, so I'll stick with those now I think. The cashback is a great offer and this time I managed to get in just at the right time, before all the online shops automatically raise prices due to demand (for example, I picked mine up for £190 delivered, they're now £230). Paying less than 100 notes for a box of this quality is a brilliant deal, I just need payday to come so I can pick up the couple of other bits I need (mainly an optical drive and VDPAU capable graphics card for video decoding) and I should be all set.

2GB works fine for NAS4FREE - I'm only intending to use it for remote backup using encrypted Rsync so will work well for me.

CPU is a bit limited but for the £109 it will have cost me with the cash back a very impressive system.

Has anyone measured the real world power consumption on one of these?

I'm tempted to get one to replace the USB drives I've currently got stuff stored on.

Not I, as I don't have it finished yet (the graphics card I need will add some power draw) and I don't have a power meter (although I may be able to borrow one from work). Random Googling brings up this match though http://www.avforums.com/forums/networking-nas/1634235-hp-proliant-microserver-power-consumption.html which suggests that it's comparable to a regular NAS device while being much more flexible.

Has anyone measured the real world power consumption on one of these?

I'm tempted to get one to replace the USB drives I've currently got stuff stored on.

The only thing thats a letdown on these servers is they dont support S3 standby - only option is hibernate.

I have WHS2011 (which is just win 2k8R2) and use a plugin called LightsOut this monitors specific IPs/machines for activity, and hibernates the server when its not required - then WOL is used to wake the server up again when it receives an access request.. according to the stats it keeps, its saved me over £125 in electricity over the two years ive had it.

Not measured the power draw on my N40. I've got a Crucial SSD in bay 1, Seagate 3TBs in bays 2-4.

I'm running Ubuntu 64bit 12.04.1 LTS, ZFS SLOG and L2ARC all on the one SSD, then a big ZFS pool on the seagates. One of the best things I've ever bought. Running SABNZB, Sickbeard, Plex, etc on it.

Waiting on an Intel NUC to arrive to use with it as a Plex client, rather than my LG TV's DLNA (which isn't that bad to be fair).

Yeah, I have a similar setup. FreeBSD, ZFS mirror on bay 1 and 2 (ready to swap out for 2TBs in 3 and 4 when I have a bit of spare cash), OS on the sticky-taped disk. Runs Sickbeard, Couchpotato, Headphones, and SabNZBd. Shortly to be running XBMC itself when I can get it to compile on FreeBSD but for now my old ION-based HTPC is running as an NFS slave with XBMC on it. Now that box isn't running ZFSonLinux the performance is a lot better, average RAM usage is now 15% rather than 99% and all the random hangs and video buffering problems in XBMC are gone. I'm also well impressed with the Microserver and will be more so when I can get the latest XBMC to compile and I can retire the ION properly.