Good Cheap Server - HP Proliant Microserver 4 BAY - OWNERS THREAD

[Cyber-Mav]

Iv used the ir gun on a lsi 9212-4i and on its original heatsink it was on the rather warm side yes but iv put up pics on here before where swapping the heatsink out to a zalman nb1 brought temps down considerably and its been in use now for many months passive no issues.
Iv got hold of a 8i card now flashed to a 9211 so will give that a go to get more ports but again from my experience bigger heatsink does the job without need for direct fan on it.
These cards are not like gpus and put out 100s of watts of heat. The data sheets show around 15w for it in operational state. Stock heatsink is very small putting a bigger one on it from even a passive gfx card style will make all the difference.
Also depending where you keep the microserver some people wont be bothered by the noise and stick a fast fan in it.
This isnt to be used in a mission critical environment, its just something for home use to play about with and see whats possible.

Just because you cant keep a sas card cool in the microserver does not mean no one else in the world can do it either.
If i want to attempt this in a passive way then why hate on me?

Edit: link to thread with pics
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/forums/threads/lsi-9212-4i-running-hot.18865987/

 

[Armageus]

Iv used the ir gun on a lsi 9212-4i and on its original heatsink it was on the rather warm side yes but iv put up pics on here before where swapping the heatsink out to a zalman nb1 brought temps down considerably and its been in use now for many months passive no issues.

Which is a fairly pointless example - the card now takes up 3 slots!!! I'd rather strap a 40mm fan to it

These cards are not like gpus and put out 100s of watts of heat. The data sheets show around 15w for it in operational state. Stock heatsink is very small putting a bigger one on it from even a passive gfx card style will make all the difference.

No they aren't like GPUs - GPUs are designed to work in a range of environments and have their own safeguards to prevent overheating (e.g. fan speed control and throttling). HBA and RAID cards don't have such safeguards as they are expect to be installed in environments with sensible airflow - a HBA won't throttle, it will just stop working.

Also depending where you keep the microserver some people wont be bothered by the noise and stick a fast fan in it.

Which was too much of an issue for me, between that and the value of my data, was why I abandoned the idea of reusing my microserver and bought a Synology.

Just because you cant keep a sas card cool in the microserver does not mean no one else in the world can do it either. If i want to attempt this in a passive way then why hate on me?

Not hating - just passing on my experience, in that the HP Raid card I tried was impossible to cool adequately in my opinion.

This isnt to be used in a mission critical environment, its just something for home use to play about with and see whats possible.

As long as you're honest that's all it is, then there's no issue - if it meets your needs then fine

Personally I think the G7's have passed their useful time - even as just a NAS with no services the CPUs are too underpowered

 

[Cyber-Mav]

to me the g7 still has uses, can use as a torrent box and as a nas that doesnt do transcoding it works fine maxes out the gigabit port on file transfers. granted im comparing this to a old netgear stora which used to max out around 30 megabytes per second.
these days im using a haswell xeon as my server since i can get 8 drives in the larger case and cpu is fast enough to do video encoding on overnight.
i want to put the g7 back into use for nas duties so just looking for ideas if people have done new stuff.
i have 3.5 inch drives i shove into a drive dock on the front of my case to put data onto and house backups so was thinking of putting them in the microserver and turning it on whenever i needed to access the drives insted of shuffling them in and out of the storage boxes they are in now.

maybe im oldskool and have too many fond memories of the g7 that i cant bring myself to part with it and find it upsetting when it gets trashed by others lol.
even if its at the end of its days its small enough and quick enough to be used to play retro emulation games etc. so will always have a use somewhere.

edit: recently this card was spotted to be coming out:
https://www.techpowerup.com/277410/mysterious-geforce-gt-1010-rears-its-head-targeting-oems
already eyeing it up for the g7. pascal based means it can do hevc decoding through its hardware.

 

[Trig]

I wouldnt say the G7 was dead, I rebuilt my old one a few years back as a storage box for a mate, FTP server, few Tb of storage and it sat under his TV and his PS picked up media to play on the TV.. And that was an N40L...

Dont get me wrong, ANY sort of heavy lifting and it would crap itself, but for simple storage it was fine, so not dead, just sat in a coffin waiting for someone to screw the lid down

 

[Avalon]

Iv used the ir gun on a lsi 9212-4i and on its original heatsink it was on the rather warm side yes but iv put up pics on here before where swapping the heatsink out to a zalman nb1 brought temps down considerably and its been in use now for many months passive no issues.
Iv got hold of a 8i card now flashed to a 9211 so will give that a go to get more ports but again from my experience bigger heatsink does the job without need for direct fan on it.
These cards are not like gpus and put out 100s of watts of heat. The data sheets show around 15w for it in operational state. Stock heatsink is very small putting a bigger one on it from even a passive gfx card style will make all the difference.
Also depending where you keep the microserver some people wont be bothered by the noise and stick a fast fan in it.
This isnt to be used in a mission critical environment, its just something for home use to play about with and see whats possible.

Just because you cant keep a sas card cool in the microserver does not mean no one else in the world can do it either.
If i want to attempt this in a passive way then why hate on me?

Edit: link to thread with pics
https://www.overclockers.co.uk/forums/threads/lsi-9212-4i-running-hot.18865987/

You describe a fan bracket as a ‘noob mod’, but are responsible for that?! Clearly I over estimated your fabrication abilities ... or it’s the late 90’s again. For the avoidance of doubt, airflow doesn’t always require strapping a fan to the card, though printing brackets is cheap/easy and can be almost silent if done properly, it does mean managing the airflow in a case properly.

This is another post where you have ignored what was said and jumped to some strange conclusions. First it was ‘well known’ I ‘hate microservers’, then I was telling people to buy ‘bigger servers’, now I can’t cool a HBA despite the post you’re replying to stating I ran a 10 drive N36L with H200 HBA and you’re being hated on because when you asked for advice, people who had actually done what you are suggesting dared to suggest that they would would consider other options first and likely approach things differently. Did you seriously just want people to agree with you? That’s not generally how advice is supposed to work.

Oh and at the risk of being told I’m hating on you again, you probably don’t want a 1010, it’s just a rejected 1030’s binned with 1/3 less SM’s and slower RAM (but GDDR5) as they’re both GP108 it has no NVENC, so it’s not a card for HW transcoding, you need a ‘50 for that or better yet an Intel iGPU as they dominate the HW transcoding landscape for obvious reasons.

 

[Cyber-Mav]

You describe a fan bracket as a ‘noob mod’, but are responsible for that?! Clearly I over estimated your fabrication abilities ... or it’s the late 90’s again. For the avoidance of doubt, airflow doesn’t always require strapping a fan to the card, though printing brackets is cheap/easy and can be almost silent if done properly, it does mean managing the airflow in a case properly.

This is another post where you have ignored what was said and jumped to some strange conclusions. First it was ‘well known’ I ‘hate microservers’, then I was telling people to buy ‘bigger servers’, now I can’t cool a HBA despite the post you’re replying to stating I ran a 10 drive N36L with H200 HBA and you’re being hated on because when you asked for advice, people who had actually done what you are suggesting dared to suggest that they would would consider other options first and likely approach things differently. Did you seriously just want people to agree with you? That’s not generally how advice is supposed to work.

Oh and at the risk of being told I’m hating on you again, you probably don’t want a 1010, it’s just a rejected 1030’s binned with 1/3 less SM’s and slower RAM (but GDDR5) as they’re both GP108 it has no NVENC, so it’s not a card for HW transcoding, you need a ‘50 for that or better yet an Intel iGPU as they dominate the HW transcoding landscape for obvious reasons.

ok advice taken, thanks for the tip on the 1030, i googled around and come onto this: checked here: https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-support-matrix-new
the 1030 has the decode capability but as you mentioned its got no encoder ability to do transcoding so i would have got shafted on that purchase.
can microserver power a 1050? i know a standard 16x pcie slot gives 75w but been reading on various places saying the gen7's slot may not give the full wack.

 

[mctiny]

ESXi will boot from a USB without issue, you can then use the NVMe as storage for your VM's as you would normally, this approach works well.

ESXI is not something I have played with in the past, it's either that or NANO server running Hyper-v from USB/SSD then geta low profile 4xNVME and whack that in the PCIE - if this proves to costly I'll probley just end up getting a 4x NVME - USB enclosure and use them as fast external drive.

 

[Avalon]

ok advice taken, thanks for the tip on the 1030, i googled around and come onto this: checked here: https://developer.nvidia.com/video-encode-and-decode-gpu-support-matrix-new
the 1030 has the decode capability but as you mentioned its got no encoder ability to do transcoding so i would have got shafted on that purchase.
can microserver power a 1050? i know a standard 16x pcie slot gives 75w but been reading on various places saying the gen7's slot may not give the full wack.

You got me, I can’t answer the ‘will it’ question from personal experience, the last GPU I ran in a MS was a 210 passive just because I needed HDMI out on Kodi.

Again this is genuinely one of those situations where I would suggest considering a different option for the money to get a better result. A 1050 is currently a £150 card new (OUCH!) or £60ish used for a 2GB (you likely want 4GB if you need to do multiple transcodes and especially if it’s say 4K high bit-rate), you can pickup a used Lenovo/Dell i3 6100/4GB/some storage SFF for £60 delivered on eBay. When it comes to HW transcoding, Intel iGPU is king for very good reasons, it’s effectively free and massively capable at very reasonable quality levels with minimal CPU/power usage, tone mapping is also not broken on iGPU unlike NVENC. You also get AES-NI capable of near gigabit VPN speeds and (in CPU mark terms) about 7x the CPU performance, which lends itself nicely to running things like the *arrs, jacket/hydra, SAB/Get, Deluge etc. if you want to.

By all means you could go the Nvidia route and assuming the PSU holds up (NVENC isn’t actually an on GPU function iirc so it won’t be pulling much power for transcodes), but the general best practice with drives is they run longer when kept cooler, you can run them hot, but just because you can, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea.

 

[Cyber-Mav]

current gpu prices are crazy so will hold out on that front. as for intel igpu the wiki shows i need something skylake or above to get hevc capabilities that gonna cut it? also wonder if intels discrete gpu will be as good with the transcoding?

 

[Avalon]

current gpu prices are crazy so will hold out on that front. as for intel igpu the wiki shows i need something skylake or above to get hevc capabilities that gonna cut it? also wonder if intels discrete gpu will be as good with the transcoding?

https://ark.intel.com/content/www/u...core-i3-6100-processor-3m-cache-3-70-ghz.html

It is Skylake and yes, it'll cut it easily and the quality is absolutely fine unless you're the kind of person who screen dumps output and zooms in to look at edge differences and colour gradients that are largely imperceivable from a normal viewing distance. If you want better quality, it's either do it all in software or a 30xx series.

 

[Stu]

Want to share that I installed HyperX FURY 2 x 8GB (16GB) HX316C10FBK2/16 into my NL40 this weekend... BIOS only reported 8GB on first boot, with windows showing 16GB but 8GB hardware reserved. After a reboot the system is seeing all 16GB normally. Searching online, it's not unusual for 16GB to be seen as 8GB, but fixed with reboot.

 

[Cyber-Mav]

Mine works with 16gb too. Basic crucial 1333mhz stuff. Although microserver runs it super slow

 

[Stu]

Mine works with 16gb too. Basic crucial 1333mhz stuff. Although microserver runs it super slow

Normally I would have gone Crucial, but I was happy to take any reputable make for the right price on ebay.

 

[Roadrunner_668]

hello everyone ! i just bought an upgraded n36l from armageus

im going to use it as a backup target mainly because i currently just occasionally copy and paste important stuff to another computer ha ha

first question is that the place ive been putting the files is a span made of two disks, is there any way to move those two disks to the hp running some kind of free nas os and keep things in tact or will i have to get another disk and copy stuff over ?

second question is i was wondering if anyone still uses their old n36l for storing media and playing it back ? is it up to the task ? if so is 1080 probably the limit ?

if the second is a no go, doesnt matter, just a bonus

thanks !

 

[Avalon]

If you want to maintain the drive's contents, then drivepool will do this iirc, but i'd suggest you are better off doing this properly from the start. It'll playback 4K video easily if you mean just sending the data stream to the client for it to directly play. FreeNAS is going to end up with you setting up a ZFS VDEV, it'll require destruction of all data on the disk, but be faster for high IO workloads which it doesn't appear you have. UnRAID will do the same, but allows you to mix and match drives, you're limited in terms of read speed to that of the drive you are reading from, so not as high IO as ZFS. OMV will do MergeFS and you can add snap raid for snapshot parity. Drivepool will merge drives and you can either mirror folders and/or use SnapRAID for snapshot RAID. Depending on what else you plan on doing with the box, your budget to spend on storage and how you intend to progress will dictate which way is best for you, FreeNAS is free, but it has a higher cost in terms of drive requirements, for a simple media/backup box, I would generally go with one of the others.

 

[Roadrunner_668]

What would you do for a simple daily backup situation of a single computer ? I was going to just be lazy and install windows on it cos i think theres space for a drive in the top ? and then use an endpoint backup program that just sends to a shared folder on the network ...

but there probably a more streamlined way of doing it

lets say I don't care about the data on the disk or I have a couple of new 3tb disks , what would you suggest a complete noob set about doing ?

 

[Stu]

I'm running MS Home Server 2012 on mine, using the built-in back after connecting my desktop, but there are certainly many other options.

 

[Jarrod]

Anyone got recommendations for the most affordable 10Giga network miniserver? 4 bays ideally..

 

[Avalon]

Anyone got recommendations for the most affordable 10Giga network miniserver? 4 bays ideally..

Slap an x540 into anything you like for £45-75? or a Mellanox ConnectX-2 or 3 (3 is cooler/more power efficient) for £30-45 if SFP+ will work for you?

 

[Roadrunner_668]

I'm running MS Home Server 2012 on mine, using the built-in back after connecting my desktop, but there are certainly many other options.

can i just check what os exactly ? is it windows server 2012 essentials ? cant see the home server name being used anymore !