I have both of these sat within a meter of me right now, both are silent. The T20 though i was disappointed with as its basically a desktop pc with server processor. The HP is a proper server, its just that the processor isnt as powerful. The HP is far better quality too.

The last thing you want is a server that is "down again"..........

Best use for this is:

a) install either Windows or a free Linux OS
b) bung at least one HDD inside
c) put all your media on it (photos, music, movies etc).
d) connect to your network with an ethernet cable (either straight into your wifi router, via a switch etc)
e) stream to your TV using something like Kodi
f) stream your music to media players around the house (can use Raspberry Pis and Squeezebox, for example)
g) whatever you want to do :smiley:

These boxes will also do your torrenting/sickbeard etc too. Much more flexible than an off-the-shelf NAS but you need a little more knowledge.

Great timing as my N40L seems to be on its way out.

I was looking at second hand gen 8s on e**y and thought I'd just have a check - last I saw they were a bit more on here a month ago... glad I checked! I'm now getting rid of my NAS drives to fund one of these - we use them at work and they're pretty impressive !

I just enabled a 14-day free trial on Flubit - hopefully they can come back with an even lower price on this deal :stuck_out_tongue:

Flubit Elite came back with £148.37 - I'm just checking the T&C's of the HP Cashback offer to see if its retailer specific :smiley:

Won't get cash back with flubit

1 x Intel Celeron G1610T / 2.3 GHz ( Dual-Core )

2300 on CPU Mark

This or a nas Qnap? Which is better quicker to set up future proof

What do people usually use this for?

any one use these for streaming blu ray / htpc duties.
can it cope with transcoding multiple streams.
can the cpu be upgraded or would I be better going for something like the t20 dell?.
need to upgrade my n36l.
thanks

Great price

I use one as a Plex server for my friends and family running Ubuntu with more RAM , Windows server kills performance I found...

Use mine mainly as plex server and local backup. Can only do one 1080p stream if transcoding.

Been waiting for this. Thanks op.
My only reservation is lack of s3 sleep and noisy fan.
I think dell t20 might be a better choice for me.

Soooo much porn...

+
Small outside

-
Small inside

Does server 2012 r2 or server 2016 install on this, drivers, etc..

Update: all versions on Server 2012 R2 is supported..

Might order one.. Heat!

Best use for this is:

a) install either Windows or a free Linux OS
b) bung at least one HDD inside
c) put all your media on it (photos, music, movies etc).
d) connect to your network with an ethernet cable (either straight into your wifi router, via a switch etc)
e) stream to your TV using something like Kodi
f) stream your music to media players around the house (can use Raspberry Pis and Squeezebox, for example)
g) whatever you want to do :smiley:

These boxes will also do your torrenting/sickbeard etc too. Much more flexible than an off-the-shelf NAS but you need a little more knowledge.

Thanks for the heads up! Picked up a couple - one for a customer, one for me.... :smile:

Personally, I use it as a 24x7 server running multiple OSs via ESXi, server software (Plex, MySQL, PHP, etc.) and NAS via 4x4TB HDDs (with 2 in a RAID 1 configuration).

It's not the best performance in the world but it does the job and I prefer it to leaving my desktop on all the time.

Only mods I made were adding a fifth HDD and adding 8GB of RAM for 10GB in total.

The last thing you want is a server that is "down again"..........

depends who pays the electric bill in your house as running a NAS 24/7 will be a hell of a lot cheaper than running this.

Is there anyone on hotukdeals that doesn't own one of these yet? :stuck_out_tongue: I've got two and trying to think of an excuse for a third one :smile:

Keeping my cheese warm.

What's the max number of HDDs does this support?

Really, how long have you had it? These should last at least 5 years. It's usually the hard disks that give up on servers, rarely the motherboard or other components.

With the internet, knowledge is free. You can do worse than starting off with one of the free courses on networking run by world class Unis on Coursera or EdX; will give you a strong theoretical basis of why you do what you do.
For quick and fast, try the many YouTube videos on this server.

I have both of these sat within a meter of me right now, both are silent. The T20 though i was disappointed with as its basically a desktop pc with server processor. The HP is a proper server, its just that the processor isnt as powerful. The HP is far better quality too.

Server 2016 in my experience runs like a dog on this even with 8gb of ram. If you go for this go linux, freenas is ideal

has anyone tried running voice servers or game servers on these ? wondering if one would be able to run counter strike global offensive dedicated servers.

are you sure about that ? seems other have been ok with the same deal in the past

I was just going to post a similar comment - especially when they are "down again". :smiley:

4 in the front slots but you can squeeze an SSD / 2.5" disk in the top where the Optical drive is meant to go

Agreed, I have several they struggle occasionally used as media servers with 3d films for instance and large .mkv

Yes I'd prefer HP for the server chassis. What worries me is non atx PSU on 5 T20. And the size.
But with no drive spin down and no s3 sleep I don't see myself buying HP.
Have to pick one of the two

This was the main reason for upgrading to this, as my current microserver doesn't have Server 2012 drivers.

Not so much. These run around 50 Watts, so maybe £50-60 a year. The bigger difference IMHO is that a NAS is easier to setup, but much less flexible. If you want an appliance buy a NAS. If you want a Linux server, and appreciate what that entails, get this.

​you can put a standard atx power supply in if you fancy doing a bit of a mod in t20. my gen8 is noisy I reconfigured it to raid and tried everything but the fan keeps going to 29 percent I now hate it and if had the money would get the Dell t20

Had mine a few months now Ge force 750 ti , 16gb, 12tb, i3 3240 and works brilliant

Got it in Feb, 2013. Windows 7 Ultimate, 3xHD's, 6Gb Ram, Zotac Video card. Runs 24/7 as a network media device. Whenever the CPU gets up to 100% (often) shortly afterwards it tends to totally freeze so I have to to a hard shutdown.Might be the software, might be a failing part, might be I am looking for an easy excuse to upgrade.

Is raid supported
Is there any hard drive included.
Server is £112
4 x 1tb hdd is another £528
Another 190 for 2x 8gb ram
£174 for the operating system
£74 for the disk drive
Are you sure that's good value. I hope I'm wrong with my estimate

what is the socket type as I have access to a Xeon cpu and want to check if it will be suitable.

Raid is supported. No hdd included and your costs are way over. There's an internal sd card slot and an internal use which can be used to host the os. In my opinion the gen 8 will do anything u want from a home server. (Might just take a little effort to do)

Great deal. Love mine, wouldn't go back to not having one. Just sits there busily downloading stuff for me to watch, read or play, which I can then access from any device on the network.

Looks like you'd be paying over the odds.

You are wrong indeed.

i've been trying to figure out if i could use one of these to replace my plex media server (built using a budget pentium G3258) i wondered if anyone could recomend a faster cpu that doesn't cost a fortune to put in one of these that will make it worth getting.

i3-3240 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 16GB ECC, 4 x 3TB recertified WD greens running freeNAS makes a nice plex server. I particularly recommend the recertified greens for that extra excitement as they clock up errors that are caught by the fault tolerant ZFS.

​Thanks for the reply. My N40L has 6 drives and is used purely for data so might just stick with that. Although I am tempted to get another microserver that can support an xeon cpu and link the 2 machines together

​why would you want it to sleep? its a server so meant to stay on.

got a N40L and N54L and run Oracle VM on them.

one had a GPU and was used for media but that has since been replaced by an NVIDIA Shield so both are used for my VMs now which works great as my main rig does a good job of heating the house if left on 24x7 whereas these ones are a bit less heat generating.

every home should have a microserver.

You're both idiots.

Could be a CPU fan on the way out?

​check out Facebook groups I bought 2x 8gb ecc ram matching pairs for £20 couple pound in petrol just need to look around a lot of older servers out there with this ram so easily obtainable

Linux is much better anyway to be honest. Anything windows can do Linux can do, only it will use half of the resources.

It will depend on which supplier Flubit uses.

You haven't got a Gfx card in the PCIe slot by any chance have you?

...and double the knowledge/setup time.

​I have a hd 5450 in it

Don't see the point in them myself

I was contemplating purchasing one but found that the processor was lacking in performance and upgradeability due to a 35watt tdp proprietory cpu cooler. However some reported models that come with a i3 3240 have a 55watt tdp cooler. The xeons for these are also very expensive. Plus psu is proprietory and hard to find replacements. I belive this has a built in raid controller which is pretty good. Also is HP ILO compatible.

For plex preferably you would want to pre transcode media for direct play e.g. mp4 and aac audio, will not tax the cpu as much - very helpful for weaker servers. For subtitles use srt files as vobsubs or ass forces plex to transcode. However for transcoding high bit rate blu-ray rips h265 and 10bit etc would require more horsepower.

As for os I'd recommend xpenology for simple and effective home nas interface.

I upgraded my N40L to one of these Gen8's last summer, stuck a Xeon E3-1220L v2 in it (17W TDP) with stock cooling. Set an alert on the well known auction site and had to wait a while but picked up for expected price. Rig flies for HTPC

Mine I3(upgraded) runs fine with the original (35w) cooler, but then I never have the CPU maxed out for long periods.
Remember the TDP of CPU is the max power,
mine idles at 34w (measured at the wall) downloads at 54w ... nice and quiet with fan at 6%??

£528?!

more like £55 each max for a WD 1TB Red, so ~£220

Good deal but can't help but think a MicroServer revision must be pretty due by now. With my N40L I bought a Pico PSU on a circuit board (with external power brick) but it wouldn't boot with the rear fan disconnected and that was still fairly loud.

Ideally want to rig up one of these with a Pico PSU and some SSDs and basically have a totally fanless silent solution (SSDs not spinning all the time compared to hard drives, still expensive but coming down rapidly now!) - maybe one day!

For Freenas, you can find some drive spin down scripts on the Freenas forum. I use a N36L as a file server and an Amlogic or Fire TV for media playing via Kodi. This means you don't need much cpu power because you are not transcoding. The Amlogoc/Fire Tv is doing the work.

Yes it's a server. And I'm not surprised sleep is disabled. It is on most servers.
For home use it will be idle for 90% of the time. So might as well sleep and save a lot of electricity that way. Then WOL in seconds when needed.
That's what my current setup does.
And as tempting as those cheap servers are, none of them can do this.

I'm led to believe gen8 does not support spin down at controller level.
Would be happy to be proven wrong.

Love my proliant! I've been running open media vault and it literally downloads and place all the files into the correct folders for plex for me.
To be fair it was a massive ball ache to set up as I used the cd sata to run a small ssd as the primary, but so far it's been running over a 100 days and never faltered

There lies the reason you have noise problems. I was the same and very upset/unimpressed until I discovered the joys of iLo (advanced), now I wonder why anyone would need a Gfx card unless they are using their Gen8 as a HTPC. You can pickup an iLo license for around £15... if you use Gen8 as a server you will never look back! :smile:

Thanks for your insight. I was about to purchase one too...

​OK thanks for the info

I may either go for the dell t20 or wait until the lenovo ts140 comes back round on offer.
my current server works fine, just needs a little more grunt for the transcoding otherwise I wouldn't bother changing. I guess I could convert the files but ideally want to retain the original sound and pic quality, it would also take ages to convert
hmm decisions decisions ...

Heat issues did not occur to me, thanks for that. I'll open her up and vacuum the inside; it might be dust build up that's affecting airflow. Otherwise i'll look at the fan.

Agreed, the Xeon in my T20-3708 hits over 7000 in Passmark and transcodes high bitrate 1080p video to 720p for use on my phone at 10x realtime (i.e. it will convert an hour of video in under 6 minutes).

Also, the T20 case has more scope for upgrades. The optical bay accepts two 2.5" drives leaving four 3.5" bays, plus another floppy bay which can house another 3.5" drive or a couple of 2.5" drives in an adapter. My own T20 has the following drives in it:

2.5" ODD Bay: 250GB SSD (vSphere primary datastore), 750GB WD Black (vSphere secondary datastore)
3.5" Bays: 4x 3TB HDDs attached to PCI-e SATA adapter which is passed through to a Synology NAS virtual machine

Yes.

No.

Correct.

In what universe? I could get 20Tb for less than that!

I bought my 8Gb stick for £30 a year ago.

Ubuntu is free.

Mine boots off a £5 memory stick.

Yes.

Good news: you are!

Sorry mate, I can only like this once haha

Synology NAS VM, that's interesting... got a link to more info?


--EDIT

Google is my friend : http://xpenology.me/downloads/

Fireworks Merchant are not on that list but I have asked Flubit to confirm who the invoice would be coming from and explained that they need to be on the partner list - will post the response.

Be careful though - A Flubit purchase might not qualify for the mfr's cash-back. Think I'd asked them (Flubit) about this previously and they confirmed the purchase would not qualify for cash-back. Voted hot.

Hello, Any idea's whether this is suitable for putting together a [email protected] rig please? Aware GPU(s) would need to be bought separately. Think this sounds a reasonable buy. Would love to know how exactly to set up as a NAS too using Xpenology etc. etc. Thank you for any help/suggestions.

Forgot to add this is 167.94 including VAT at Servers Plus. Would prefer not to give eBuyer business. Their post-sales service is abysmal with recent experiences dealing with them.

https://www.serversplus.com/servers/tower_servers/hp_tower_servers/819185-421

Thanks for the info... Flubit have some issue with creating this offer anyway.
I get the price discounted but when I add the server to my basket the offer expires.

I think Flubit know its too much of a steal at <£145 :stuck_out_tongue:

​Thing is it was running at 10 percent for over a year until I changed the 4x 500gb hard drives to 2x 3tb drives now it is always 29 percent. I got an advanced ilo license free 2 minute Google and found a code but I don't really have any use for it as it is used as a htpc would love the lenovo ts140 to come back on offer that is the one I wanted unless the new gen 9 has an offer one day it has more sata connections

well in that case here's an even better link for you :smiley:

http://www.serversdirect.co.uk/hp-proliant-gen8-g1610t-microserver-819185-421/version.asp?PID=768

anyone recommend a good guide for setting these up/installing plex etc?

Ive been tinkering away with one of these for a while but struggling to setup from scratch

Or the original forum here: http://xpenology.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=2

Worth noting Ebuyer are on Quidco

What OS are you using? I've finally got my up and running after trying a few different OS, so could probably point you in the right direction.

Feel free to send me a PM and I can help you with this.

Thanks for the offer of assistance. I was going to use windows but im open to any suggestions. My plan is to use the device as a plex media server. I just cant seem to get an OS installed on the device. Ive got one SSD for the OS installed in one of the bays and 2x 4TB Western Digital drives

Thank you. They're basically the same price as eBuyer etc. (possibly 2p cheaper). Never bought from serversdirect.co.uk. Not sure what their service is like.

Windows is what I ended up using too. If you're using just the bays for the OS and storage, you'll need to make sure that the OS drive is in the first bay.

Plug the OS drive in and make sure the storage drives aren't plugged in, put the Windows installation on a USB stick and into one of the front USB ports. Start the server and use the one time boot from the USB stick. Follow instructions to install Windows on the selected hard drive.

After that you can chose how to manage your two storage drives, you can either use the HP Smart Storage Array tool or use something like Drivepool to manage the drives, the choice is yours.

Make sure you change the BIOS option to boot from the hard drives.

Is the installation or server falling over on a particular bit?

May be better to take this in a private conversation, so feel free to private message me. Don't wanna clog up the main thread.

I would check those drives and what temperature their SMART is reporting.
I had a similar issue with a spare drive, the bios was panicking that the drive was reporting an overheat condition and forcing the fan high.
The reality was that the drive was not reporting its SMART temperature correctly.

​I checked the ilo and the 3tb drives are running at around 38c compared to one of the 500gb at 25c so a lot higher plus the i3 3240 in there now so probably my fault the fan is higher it's just so annoying when windows starts it is 18 percent which is ok but then slowly climbs I have done everything suggested on homeserver forum just need to live with it I guess.

Are the drives the same RPM ? Could be that affecting it...

have they tried switching it off, then on again?

​Exactly the same drives reading about for quiet operation you need hd-max in Ilo showing if it is not then no hard drives are showing the temperature everything checks out for me but it is in a smaller space right now so going to move it into a more open space as room temperature affects it a lot

Once you have invested in the knowledge it's much faster to setup, configure and boot up. Honestly if you percivere you will never go back to windows.

Absolutely. My only gripe is that knowing how stable and efficient Linux distros invariably are makes my unavoidable use of windows for my day to day work coding so frustrating.

I know, I've seen Linux server "uptime" in excess of 1000 days without reboot.

Do you have some pointers on how to get this set up?

is there a usb inside the device, looking to add esxi

Out of stock this morning

I could be wrong but I think its because you have built it as you would a desktop - Gfx card, 7200rpm HDDs, etc. Unless you actually use the Gfx card to output to screen regularly you would be better off using iLo, trust me, after making the switch I would never go back! Next, its better to use server-oriented HDDs such as WD REDs or any of the cooler/quieter 5400rpm models out there as the server will be always on and fast access to OS files (for example|) is not necessary. I think a lot of people boot these servers from SSD for convenience more than anything else. As someone else stated, its probably one HDD in the bunch that is causing all the problems. Mine runs at 6% and is quiet as a mouse. I love it! :smile:

My Gen7 N40L is nearly 5 years old now. The power supply popped (loudly) a couple of years ago and the official HP replacement ones cost nearly as much as a new MicroServer. I bought an FSP FSP250-50GUB power supply from Scan and saved myself about £80. That worked fine and the server is still going strong.
The build quality of these things is really good and I'd have no hesitation in recommending them for many purposes, though I feel mine seems a bit underpowered now and I'd go for a Xeon when I get round to replacing it.

Out of stock.

I use it constantly for films to surround sound so need the graphics card the drives are 7200 and I use an ssd for Windows it's just weird it was quiet then suddenly constantly loud. it was on the floor next to the TV unit but now in the computer cupboard with a long hdmi cable I think the cupboard doesn't help because last night the inlet temp was 27c and the fan was 31 percent I opened the door it went to 26c then fan 29 percent so I need to put it in a cooler place thing is works great sabnzbd and kodi and sharing out pics with family miles away etc

Great.. :disappointed: just when i wanted one ​

They are available in stock here for the same price (also with cashback):
http://www.serversplus.com/servers/tower_servers/hp_tower_servers/819185-421

Thank you ed80!!

Yes, it does. I have a USB stick with GRUB installed on it plugged into mine, although ESXi seems to be a popular route that people take.

​thanks for the reply

Attach the ssd to the odd sata port
http://homeservershow.com/attaching-a-ssd-to-the-odd-sata-port-in-my-hp-proliant-gen8-microserver.html

Then install open media vault from a bootable USB

http://wiki.openmediavault.org/index.php?title=Installation

I had issues with my particular USB keyboard. I found that using a different one overcame this, I've no idea the reason why but the install is picky when it comes to seeing USB keyboards!!!!

I then used this tutorial to get me set up and running but to be honest it's pretty intuitive anyways and the forums are great!

https://thekentishman.wordpress.com/guides-2/open-media-vault-set-up/

Use iLo and you wont need a usb keyboard plugged in.

Is there still a 2Gb limit on HDDs if you install WHS?

​It's a Windows limit, but per drive letter - have a read of this:
Windows support for hard disks that are larger than 2 TB

​I have an add-on installed on my N40L running WHS 2011 called "Lights Out" which turns my server on at about 1am and turns it off at about 7am (used in conjunction with Sonarr and NZBGet) which makes it really cost effective.