Replacing HP Microserver

Snax · 9 Aug 2020 at 11:12

My G7 Microserver has just died and am trying to look at options to replace it.

It is mainly used for storing movies I have ripped from Blu Ray as well as preserving important files. I have an HTPC downstairs that reads the data from the drives

I would like to get to a smaller footprint than the microserver whilst preserving the redundency of the RAID configuration.

The current capacity is about 4tb (4*2tb). Is a WD Home Duo attached to my home pc the cheapest option? Is there anything particularly horrific about these drives that means I should switch to a proper NAS? Are there any other options for up to £500 i could consider?

I would love to just build a small server but I think whatever I build will be bigger than the microserver.

andy_mk3 · 9 Aug 2020 at 11:17

I think your options are Gen10 microsever or a Synology/Qnap box.

BongoHunter · 9 Aug 2020 at 11:36

You could get a chassis like a In-Win MS04 (IW-MS04-01) - they are about £150 and come with a PSU - they have 4 external hotswap HDD bays, and a slim optical bay you can add 2 hotswap SSDs into if needed, it also has some internal non hotswap capacity.

Add pretty much any ITX Ryzen board and the cheapest AM4 chip you can find - you could probably do this for under £500 and have a very capable machine with 16gb of RAM and SSD OS drive. This would also offer you expansion options too such as being able to add more RAM or NVME cache in the future.

Or upgrade your HTPC so its also your server?

Avalon · 13 Aug 2020 at 17:31

What’s the specific need for the smaller footprint? You aren’t physically going to get much smaller than a microserver while maintaining the same drive count (6+). I mean if you want to throw money at it and don’t mind smaller capacity, you could run a dual NVMe set-up on a NUC (a few exist), but you still have a power brick which likely makes the footprint very similar overall and you’re still limited to gigabit which kind of makes NVMe pointless and expansion has to be external. Using your PC as a basis of comparison, the G7 idle is low, a desktop can easily be several times higher. Build wise lots of cases offer a similar footprint to the G7 etc. as stated on the other thread, again a G10/+ makes little sense to any home user. Ever.