I have one of these (purchased it a month back) and a N54L. This one is a LOT quieter than the N54L and I am very pleased with it. Very well built if you compare the two

discontinued now :disappointed:

Anyone managed to get the cash back? Mine got rejected due to not UK seller.

Damn, missed the cash back... Anyone know if it'll be back or suggest anything similar around the £150 mark please??

Cheers,

Rich

Hi Folks, I'm an IT guy buy day but this is my first dable into Server stuff. Whilst I've got my head round most of the concepts I wonder if anyone could point me towards a good build guide. Not so much how to do things but what considerations to make when Spec'ing RAM, HD, RAID verison etc

Cheers
TFC

Anyone tell me if the DVD Drive bay on this has room for a full size HDD like the old ones? I want to upgrade but I need room for an extra drive..




I use seperate virtual machines for different purposes.

1 Linux Virtual machine downloads my content,renames it and puts it into the right folders. 1 Virtual machine is my Linux Plex Server, 1 virtual machine is a Window server for backups and other windows based stuff, and I have another linux server for hosting gamng servers on.

This allows you to specify an exact amount of cpu and ram usage for each specific task, also to give each of them specific priotaries when it comes to which gets more cpu when they all need it. It also allows me to use the perfect operating system for each of these different tasks.

If it is purely for storing media to stream around the house to xbmc devices does the RAM need updating?

Ordered! Thanks.. my old Readynas Duo is getting a bit flakey - was about to opt for a more expensive 2 bay Synology, but this is a far better option. Just hope I get it delivered before the 31st!, read the cashback small print after I'd ordered (and procrastinated for days)... hey, even with the £35 on top it's still a good deal.

I've been sitting on the fence for too long and my storage squeeze is finally starting to pinch. I'm looking for a NAS type solution mainly require storage for Music & Pictures.

What's the best route the Synology or the server route????

As a side what's the best solution to get the Music from the NAS to a regular amp?

What would be recommendations for OS as I presume it doesn't ship with any. Would really like to use MS based Server OS purely to aid with learning my "day job" -But really what is the most cost efficient way to access it (legally!)

mine came last week - added 8GB of Corsair RAM to it and kept the original 2GB installed ... so 10GB total. Other than that, I bought a molex y-splitter cable so I could add an SSD to the Sata port on the motherboard. Sata hosts the datastore for ESXi and the OS boots from internal USB drive.
Been running a week now with ESXi:
1 vm with synology that hosts plex - 4 1.5TB drives RDM'd in RAID10 - 4GB RAM
1 vm with tretflix (running sab, sick and couch) - 4GB RAM

Had no problems really other than a few movies that stutter due to transcoding to the XboxOne Plex app - down to CPU I think but I'm investigating further to see if I can resolve it.

Transfer speeds to Synology is about 80mb/sec and far quicker than my expectations. It's quiet (sat behind my TV), ilo makes managing easier, and best of all ... low power!

Having had it a week I would deffo recommend it although if I had the extra cash, I would've bought a cpu upgrade as plex is our main entertainment hub ... but saying that ... only large movie files seem to be a problem so far.
If my wife wasn't already grumpy that I bought a new toy ... I would probably get another ! :-)

I've got Windows Server 2012 Essentials running on mine, best thing I've ever bought! Love the iLO. Stuck a spare Crucial M4 128GB SSD in it for the OS.

Just ordered the below to go with it, going to end up costing me a fortune :/

Kingston Technology 8 GB DDR3 1,600 MHz DIMM ECC Memory Module
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B008LMNHB8/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Asus ATI Radeon HD 5450 Silent Graphics Card (1GB, DDR3, PCI-Express)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B004U4WYLU?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00

Logitech Wireless Touch Keyboard K400 - UK layout
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B005LDLQXG?psc=1&redirect=true&ref_=oh_aui_detailpage_o00_s00

Now to save some cash for a 2 x 3TB WD Reds... *gulp*

I bought this 2 days ago, and I have installed the Synology DSM software on it, as that offer a great range of apps and package addons.
Its twice as powerful as a 4 bay Synology unit and half the price.

Thanks for your advice. You are quite right, it's probably not worth the risk

Hi, I made a Flubit demand and got an offer of £169.35. If I took that offer would I still get the cask back?

Servers just turned up, 2GB ram installed rather than the suggested 4GB on this thread.

Where's the cheapest place to get PC3-12800 Unbuffered ECC ram?

Best I could find is this: http://www.ebuyer.com/544341-crucial-ct102472ba160b-8gb-ddr3-pc3-12800-unbuffered-ecc-1-5v-1024meg-x-72-ct102472ba160b

thanks for your advice....and to all the previous comments as well. really appreciate it! G

So ebuyer put the price up by £5 and then drop it by £5 again. does that means they will drop it to the £100 mark?

Doh - I cancelled my order and bought http://www.ebuyer.com/544341-crucial-ct102472ba160b-8gb-ddr3-pc3-12800-unbuffered-ecc-1-5v-1024meg-x-72-ct102472ba160b instead ... should've just left it as it was :disappointed:

Ah, good to know. I have some spare at home so I might try it when my server turns up. Cheers.

It does still work, I have non-ECC unbuffered memory in mine and its fine.

I could be wrong but the RAM you've bought is 'non-ECC unbuffered' but the server needs 'ECC unbuffered'...

http://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c04123182.pdf

This is what I ended up getting - http://www.ebuyer.com/394597-kingston-valueram-16-gb-2-x-8-gb-memory-dimm-kvr16n11k2-16
fingers crossed it will be fine :smiley: comes tomorrow along with the Gen8

hi,

just wanted to bring to attention if anyone missed the below server which has cashback too. I am upgrading my server to this as I use plex remotely and had issues with my N54L when transcoding.

http://www.hotukdeals.com/deals/lenovo-thinkserver-ts140-4gb-xeon-e3-1225-v3-3-2ghz-tower-server-219-99-after-cash-2160791

Thanks but aren't the quickspecs just a way of HP getting you to buy they're stuff? WD Red HDDs aren't on the quickspecs either but everyone's happy to use them...

Anyone know if this RAM is suitable?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kingston-Technology-ValueRam-DDR3-1600/dp/B008LMNXS0

I have some questions, if anyone can help I'd be grateful; I've built a PC before, but a server is one step further than I'm currently comfortable with, and not sure if it will fit my needs better than a NAS drive.

I'm looking to build a headless, semi-automated download station, using SABNZBD, SickBeard etc, all of which I'd preferably like running on the server hardware. It will serve content via wired connections to an Acer Revo which is employed solely as an HTPC, and possibly, if I can get it to work, to a Chromecast (advice please, is this possible?). I'd also be keeping a backup of my photography, business documents and music (all of which are also backed up on external HDDs)

The HTPC runs Kodi and very little else, has 4GB RAM and 512MB dedicated graphics so should be no need to run Kodi / Plex on the server itself; unless this is doable on the server to cut out the middleman?

Would this be a good fit for this purpose? It certainly fits into the sort of budget I'd like to spend, and the specs look good enough to run the downloading software (if not Plex / Kodi) straight out of the box. However, would it need a separate SSD drive to run the OS, or is it OK to run it on a partition of the main drives?

I'd like to run a RAID variant also, and had been looking at 4TB WD Red drives. Ideally, I'd like to maximise storage space while still maintaining a fairly "safe" storage model - is there much of a trade-off of safety in something like RAID5 over RAID1? As above essential documents will be backed up separately.

Thanks in advance, any help appreciated.

Can I ask what Xeon specifically you have? So I know what to buy for mine :smiley:

It's a personal choice. Obviously it's safer to have a mirror arrangement, but then you only get 16tb instead of 24tb usable.....

With 1 CPU socket NUMA would make no difference, any more memory slots would still use the single memory controller.

Could this run plex media server and plex home theatre on the same machine?
Thinking of putting it in the hall and running a long ethernet and hdmi direct to my AV receiver to replace my rubbish NAS. Or is this quiet enough to have in the living room without being able to hear it?

dang, and there's me running windows 8, all this time I should of paid out for a server license! thanks for the tip :smiley:

apologies for the long ranting post!

if you just want a plug and play network storage personally I would go for a NAS device, If you want to tinker around this machine will be more fun, but you could get a couple of TB of plug and play storage for less than this

there's a few 2TB NAS devices on amazon for less than this device, just plug into your router and any home pc can access the files, some of them over built in support so you can access them away from home provided you have internet.

a dedicated NAS would use less power than this machine, you may not be able to get as fast read/writes but realistically your network will limit you more than the hardware on the machine

They might have got the description wrong the model above comes with 4gb

Windows server 2012 costs a fortune though unless you can get a copy by other means friends in IT etc. I thought they came with 2gb but it states in description to get this 388584 to match current 4gb. Think I will take the plunge because WHS 2011 ideally needs 4gb but can't really do much with 2gb

Well I'm afraid to tell you if your 'home pc' has all that then it is no longer a 'home pc' and now a 'server' hence the difference between the two.

So if I put Windows Server 2012 instead of Xpenology on this would it not be up to running Plex? I don't believe I need transcoding as it's only going to be streaming to a WDTV Live box.

Also any idea how much ram does this actually come with? Site states 2gb but some on her have said 4gb...

This can do it with Xpenology which I have used and works well. But you have loads of other choices if the synoloogy software has limitations you don't like. You can always sell it for what you pretty much paid for it later as they don't lose much money

I've ordered this but your post has made me think I've made a mistake. Is this server no good as a media server? That's what I wanted it for... Am I better off with a Synology NAS?

does this support raid5?

and what benefits does that bring for the uninformed?

I have a 'home' pc that supports ECC RAM, nearly all of the motherboards I've ever done have supported it, and what's different in the chipset? support for Xeon's? well that's any normal motherboard also...(I use a Xeon chip as it was cheaper than an i7, I'm also using 32gb 'server' ram, speaking as someone who has worked with 'servers' in work on large scale other than the coolness factor of having your a home 'server' I see no point...maybe you want high availability, so you have failover power supplies, no wait, this doesn't have that either

the only feature I can think of is NUMA on a server, and this particular server seems a bit pointless and it doesn't have enough ram slots to justify it, and it comes with a budget 'desktop' cpu which has just wiped out any advantage of having a server chipset

I also don't see the advantage of paying for support for home user for software updates

to sum up this cpu is not suited for home media or server use, personally I would get an i3 or higher if you were to use it as then you could benefit from Quick Sync and almost double the performance, an interesting point is this cpu supports 32gb of ram, yet HP state this server grade computer only supports 16gb, and from my experience with server's, they will gimp the bios to not support more than what the sales spec sheet says, otherwise you would never upgrade your expensive server's!

I'm not saying this isn't a good buy, what I'm saying this is a budget desktop pc in a nice server chassis, if you want nice hot swappable drives from the front then this is a good buy, if your just using this as a media server you can buy better, if you purely want network storage, then why buy this at all?

why would want to run all of the above under one os? I would trust you with my car keys. lol

yeah swapping my n40l for this cos of many reason. Firstly my n40l had a quad port nic plus the on board nic making it 5 and as a vmware engineer I used it for vm traffic, vMotion, ft, Mgmt traffic and iscsi. but always wanted the extra nic to do iscsi port binding which the gen8 will let me as it comes with 2 on board nics plus my existing quad port making it 6. Secondly, I need a faster processor speed as this is 2.3 unlike the 1.5 n40l. thirdly I wanted to be able to do evc which the n40l can't and this will. fourthly.... The list goes on. oh and yeah usb 3 @ the back for a bonus and lastly......

I disagree. With large drives RAIDZ1 is not advisable. Rebuild time is very long with 8TB drives....several days. The chance of another drive failure during that period is much higher than most people anticipate.

I believe so, I installed Windows 8 on one, and when I RDP to it,it is really laggy!

(blatantly copy and pasted from when I replied to the post at 149 here. Still handy I think!)

To anyone wondering, the G1610T in this is substantially ahead of the AMD Turion in the N54L (and even further ahead of the N36L). And it's the lowest spec CPU that'll fit - plenty of people have whacked in low power & heat (one and the same!) T version i3s, i5s and equivalent Xeons - often fairly cheap on ebay, look for S and T models.

As far as usefulness, well, RAM is more often more important for fileserving and virtualising, but CPU counts too, especially with transcoding on a media server or similar. 16gb, 2x 8 fits fine, and the CPU is a good un, with the option to upgrade.

You can't fit a 3.5" drive in top, but a 2.5" sits in there neatly, and what with 8TB drives for under £200, 4x those plus a boot SSD is ideal for a home server.

I would recommend a ZFS Raid Z-1 for the big drives - probably on a straight ubuntu or something nowadays, mature enough ZFS and easier to install more gubbins , e.g cloudmin for virtualisation- for dump storage of media etc and still backup the most important stuff, leaving 24tb of usable space with the ability to lose a drive before you lose data. If you're buying seagate that'd be nice :smiley:

That leaves the PCI-E free for a graphics card for some double duty as a media PC, or TV tuner to stream freeview/freesat around the house thanks to TVHeadEnd or similar. With the dual NIC onboard you can easily virtualise a router too with pfsense / clearOS or similar.

On my advice we got five of these in where I work, to serve as quiet, low power always on servers in 5 different locations, and so far, I'm very impressed. I've also recommended/built 3-4 N36, N40 and N54 to/for various friends and my own dad, and I say this new Gen8 is a worthy successor. You won't beat it for £149!

PS.

The BIOS needs to be set to RAID mode if you want to boot from the SSD. You don't need to actually use the built in soft raid, just need it in RAID not AHCI/IDE :smiley:

New PPS.

RAM doesn't have to be expensive. I would definitely find second hand on ebay. There's lots of server memory floating about on ebay quite cheap (as in, a lot cheaper than non ECC/unreg stuff). If it's DDR3, definitely ECC, and definitely *not* 'reg' or registered, then chances are it will work just fine.

Give this search a whirl here

PPPS.

Sound wise, it's about the same as the N54L. Which is to say quieter than your average desktop by some margin. For me, I wouldn't notice it was turned on, but maybe I've spent too much time around things with fans in.

Great server for the money, I have had the original N34 and then upgraded to the N54L. You can do so much more with one of these compared to a Synology / ReadyNAS. As someone already mentioned there is a "unoffical" port of the Synology software which I have trialed before along with tons of other OS installs to choose from. I now have Server 2012 R2 on mine and have it on 24/7. It holds all our media, backups etc and runs downloading software.

If they drop below £100 I might be tempted to upgrade :smiley:

ECC ram seems to be a bit overkill for a home play thing though really. As long as people are backing up the main box why would it matter

I bought a n40l after all the hype on here.

I found it useless as a plex server as it couldn't transcode without stuttering and pausing. That was with whs.

I now use a mac mini as a plex server and point it to this for the storage.

just wish Windows sbs was as cheap on hp as lenovo.

With FreeNAS you are supposed to use ECC memory though...

I want one too because of the hype but after reading the newer posts, am I understanding it correctly that I can just use my spare decent laptop I have at home and connect it to external hard drives and it'll perform better just as well (if not better) than this micro server?

...and they're right.

I couldn't just use mine as a Nas think it is a waste I use Windows Home Server 2011 connected to my tv so I can surf the net use Netflix and Kodi etc then share out everything and use as a Nas as well can also backup your other pc's and restore if the hard drive fails back to original state and use sabnzb and any other program plus use it away from home with RDP etc.

Cheers mate just the answer i was looking for. I have been looking at the software you mentioned already so i think i definetly gonna get it

Strange- listing must have changed as I got unbuffered memory. Sorry for that! (looking at it they only had 8 left when I bought)

I have 2 N54L, identical, running identical hard drives, but one is 'rattly'. I ended up stuffing little bits of paper in the gaps above the hard drive caddies and it immediately made it quieter. I've kinda gotten used to the fan noise, but if these Gen8 models are quieter, I may consider an upgrade.

Remember this is a great choice for file sharing, but poor for transcoding, so if using to share media files you may need to upgrade the processor...


Really? To start, try chipset and support for ECC RAM...

If someone can build a similar size pc that can hold at least 4 hard drives with similar power or better, do it. I would like to see another option as I don't like the tacky silver colour and the stupid expensive ram issue.

What advantages does this have over a Nas? Really tempting

yup pretty much

and a lot of pc's have 6 sata ports as standard now, and i've never known a pc to struggle running 6 drives, i'm not seeing the 6 drive support either, i'm seeing 4 hot swappable bays. i'm also confused to the point of this machine...

people seem to think there is a difference between a 'server' and a 'home' pc

The only thing I can think of is that the drives are hot swappable, which any modern Intel based chipset also supports at least every mobo I've had supported it since core 2 came out...and the switch stacking, that's neat

although if you do need/want this kind of chassis then it does seem good :smiley: personally i'd prefer a mini tower or base with a fanless lower power setup

Of course.....but what are you running the network on? Does it have 6 HDD? I was looking at network drives to store media but I couldn't find anything near the price of the N54L (gen 8 predecessor)....which at the time, was only £100

Can someone please tell me (without being too technical) why this would be better than a Synology NAS for media streaming and file storage? I was going to buy a Synology DS215j for streaming video to my WDTV but is this server better for that? What OS would be best for this basic need? Not interested in doing anything else with it. Thanks

Can I not do the same just by having a network in the house?

See you have lost me already.

If you bothered to read my post you would not ask the question!

Other people have given some reasons for virtualisation, but I'll add one: pfsense doesn't run on Linux. It's a FreeBSD distribution.

That memory will not work in the Microserver Gen 8 as it's ECC Registered memory, and the microserver takes ECC unbuffered.

so ... mentioned this already, but does anyone know if getting this server to 16GB can be done on the "cheap" ? i.e. less than £100.

They do say don't put all your eggs in one basket. Sometimes it's just better to have dedicated instances of an OS for each of these. It allows you to break one without breaking all of it :smiley:

Well since everyone else has replied:

1) VPN server
2) Redmine server
3) Acestream host (still working on that one!)
4,5) Various dev environments

Although personally I use containers myself. That might change unless MediaMonkey release a Linux version.

Are you using Hyper-V Server 2012 (the core version), works very well for me on N54L

Ordered this yesterday for £184.99, reckon I could get a fiver back if I contacted Ebuyer? I know Amazon/Tesco do that.

Or just set it up on Linux and do all of above?

have one as a mythtv server - very reliable.

1. Pfsense
2. NAS / Plex
3. UT 2004 Server for myself and friends
4. Webserver for testing and messing about with.

The first 3 i have running 24x7.

Virtualization is the future.

Any idea on the power draw down of one of these when active/idle?

does anyone have any idea on how much this would cost to run per year in terms of electricity cost if left on 24/7/365?
I currently have an old server which i use for file storage/plex media server/CCTV DVR. but it certainly drinks some juice and is far too noisy.
My next consideration was to build a low cost server using a Raspberry Pi 2. but open to options?

I also have an N54L with 4GB RAM with Windows 2012 Standard, got uTorrent, Plex Server and a CS:GO server running on it, works perfect for me with all 4 drive bays populated with HDs too. Can't run a VM with any decent speed though with HyperV, but I guess that's because I tried it with HyperV...

Now a really dumb question. I have looked at these things in the past and read up on them but am still a bit bemused as why one would need one. I find there is so much jargon flying around it is like a different language.

does it take the same RAM as in N54 in case I upgrade?

Sure - I want Tretflix running on one, xpenology running on a seperate VM, Web Server on another and a standard windows machine for playing around with ... I grant you, it might be overkill - but it'll be a fun project if I had the RAM

Plex on Ubuntu runs perfectly on 2GB. Not tried Windows version, but if you want a dedicated Plex box, Ubuntu is a lot quicker, and less resource hungry.

I was looking at buying a Synology DS215j but maybe this would be better for me? All I want is a media server (Plex if this) and file server really. Would this be more suitable?

Can anyone help please? Is this the best thing to use to backup all my pictures and files on my home computer, and also access them via another comp connected to the network in the house.

Can you only get 4 HD's in this and not 5-6 like the older microservers?

Would the Gen 8 startup my current system (Ubuntu) if I port the HDD from my N54L over physically?

Studying. I clicked on this link with the same thoughts in mind. Looking for a separate machine for vm's & GNS. It would defo need more memory than 2GB. Not sure on the other specs

Lol saw it on ebuyer and thought hotukdeals posters aren't awake yet as the price updates is not up. got me self 2 to replace my n40l

Great, thanks for the info

Also have N54L running Plex on UnRaid. It's noisier than my projector. I don't have an option to move it somewhere else either (well, I could move it closer to the window, it's usually very cold there - hmmm...).

Is this suitable for home use? I was thinking of using it for Plex and downloading etc...? Thank for any advice...

so how much of an upgrade is this over the n54l, as I am tempted to swap my n54l for this

I'd buy this without a second thought if it wasn't for the RAM ... been so tempted to grab one as I have the disks already - £110 is cheapest I've found to get this to 16GB. If it was even half that price to upgrade, I'd grab one without a second thought.

On a lot of forums there is a constant topic about fan noise. Well, mine was very silent but I probably has the new firmware on it.

From reading online the fan noise is related to whether you use the on board controller in RAID mode or not.

Can ask why any home user would require 4 VM's?

1) It would be.
2) It has 4GB.

I have one of these (purchased it a month back) and a N54L. This one is a LOT quieter than the N54L and I am very pleased with it. Very well built if you compare the two

Agreed. I would be interested to fid this out as well. If anyone has one of these and a N54 as well, is this new one quieter?

Posted via bloody mobile, don't know how it managed that on the auto correct :smile:

:laughing: Oops

You beat me to the price update. This is getting seriously tempting...