I've posted some info on the ML10 Gen9 here.

Good price. Shame they have cut corners so much since replacing the ML110 and removed the proper ILO card in favour of IntelAMT and ditched the front drive bays and Dual NIC's

Personally I'd look for a nearly new ML110 G7 instead....

Usual HUKD convention / expectation is to state purchase price in deal title.

Good price. Shame they have cut corners so much since replacing the ML110 and removed the proper ILO card in favour of IntelAMT and ditched the front drive bays and Dual NIC's

Personally I'd look for a nearly new ML110 G7 instead....

Amended accordingly.

Now do I use this for a NAS?

If someone could figure out how to use this as a NAS, this would be great.

I've posted some info on the ML10 Gen9 here.

"This article will point out some of it’s advantages and disadvantages..."

*its

Very useful article though, thanks for sharing.

yes you can run xpenology or freenas on them

May not be the best, but as it's fundamentally a basic spec pc and you can't build one for this price.

Nice Info.

The six ports is very useful, if you`re using it a NAS or media server then 4 Terrabyte disks are maybe the sweetest size to buy. My main server is full with 4x4, it`s amazing how quickly that has happened and I haven`t even ventured into 4K yet! It`s a pity all the USB 3 ports are one the back. I don`t think the lack of bracing is important in practice. If it is a full tower server, (it doesn`t as though it is) then that is a disadavatage.

Do you think an 'averagely' techie person (not to your standard!) would manage this OK as a NAS?

Might seem silly to say this, but if a NAS was say 3 or 4 out of 10 on a complexity scale. What would setting this up be? Also, any idea how the power consumption would compare?

Thank you.

If you just want to build something that provides Network Attached Storage then it's pretty straightforward - however, most people want other features, such as automated backups, media servers, VPN services etc.etc. and getting the software to support these features, installing and configuring it isn't straightforward (in your numbering you would be up at 7 / 8 ). That's part of the extra value that NAS vendors such as Synology and QNAP provide.

In hardware terms this box would (with a few caveats) make a decent basis for building your own NAS/Home Server, I was impressed by how low-power it could be (idle was around the 15W mark).

Thank you for that, much appreciated.

I use Ubuntu and Webmin for running my headless server.

i use openmediavault on gen8 excellent NAS

Anyone know how many free RAM slots it comes with? I mean, I know it comes with 4GB, but is it all in one slot or what?

Edit; On the Ballicom website it states 1 x 4GB.

Does anyone know if this one supports S4 Suspend? My current server doesn't and it's a bit of a pain having to hibernate it so it's not just on permanently!

Does the integrated controller provide ZFS with direct disk access or would I need to fit a third party controller myself?

Great price for the spec, I've bought one to replace my N54L. Heat added.

ok. How do you 'work' this machine. When I boot it up, all I get in the boot options are UEFI Built-in EFI Shell, UEFI IP4 or UEFI IP6. That's with three different HDD (2 SSDs and old microserver drive)

lol ... now another dumb issue. Get to my server login prompt - ie "Press CTRL + ALT + DELETE to log on". When it hit that, the machine reboots....

I'm now almost convinced that this server is a not worth the purchase price.
I registered it only to find that the warranty is only until October - as it if has been previously registered. Tech support for setting it up is expired (on 5th Jan) as that is only 90 days. The HP website won't let me download firmware, and the driver links there are broken. They don't supply a CD with it so you're buggered.

Managed to get it set up now. I was able to put drivers on the disk in my old microserver, then access it via remote desktop connection to install the correct drivers for the mouse/keyboard when in the ML10.

Like others I thought this would be a sweet deal for a FreeNAS box; £105 after cashback for the Pentium, some more ECC memory to make 12G, and four 2Tb drives that were gathering dust. Some weeks later, after tearing my hair out with one issue after another, I'm sorry I ever made the purchase.

The good: It's quiet, and there is plenty of space inside for drives, though for any more than 4 you'll need power splitter cables (£10) for the 5th and a wiring kit for the 6th to use the optical connector. It's also very quiet, except for about 20 seconds after you attach the power cable, when the fans go into overdrive. There's also a TPM connector for adding that module for the security aware of you.

The bad: Graphics are twin Displayport only, and you either need a native cable, or an active (not passive) adapter. This may easily set you back another £25 to find one that works. The BIOS menu us awful, and if you've had to mess about as much as I had with different CDs and drives, the constant selecting of the right boot device is agonising.

The ugly: HPE's support site is cripplingly slow and cumbersome, and very much set up for Enterprise, not the casual user. Like others here, once registered, the support clock started from October 2016, not Jan 17, as if it had already been registered. That meant that my initial support had already expired, and I was not longer able to download updates! A support ticket was needed to reset...

Out of the box it doesn't support headless (ie without an attached monitor) operation, which means it's pretty useless for slinging in a cupboard without a monitor, so you have to figure out exactly the right combination of pull downs on the site to get the files you need. The 1.04 firmware you need for headless isn't included in the Proliant SPP rollups packages (who knew?), and can only be found for Windows 2012R2 (not essentials). The way round that is to find an old Windows 8.1 disk and temporarily install that (any number of Linux Distros stubbornly refusing to create the appropriate flash files) and eventually I successfully applied it.

Now that I've gone through all the learning and pain, it seems to be rock solid; haven't had a chance to benchmark data transfer performance versus my Gen8 Microserver yet but it looks promising. Given the time it took to iron out all the wrinkles though, my "bargain" represented poor value for money.... your mileage may vary.

Only isues I had there were when I switched to and from UEFI and Legacy support in order to try and flash the hard drive bios; it has very little support for booting legacy OS such as DOS to use manufacturer utilities. If you need to do things like that I'd advise you use a different box.

As I said above, the BIOS menus to recognise and select different boot devices are very clunky (especially when you have four or five SATA drives, the internal USB and an external CD ROM all connected); takes a while to get your head around how it shows them.

Other than that the controller has worked fine; I never played with the RAID settings as FreeNAS likes to assume direct control of the disks in ZFS.

Hi VimesUK,

Haven't used pfsense, but don't be put off by the pentium badge; the processor itself fairly motors along for normal use; for sure you wouldn't want to use it as a heavy duty esx host, but the AES encryption seems to work fine protecting my freenas drives without undue overhead.

As I say though, you MUST upgrade to firmware 1.04 to use it in headless mode (additional GPU or not it in my experience); it simply wouldn't boot without that. The only way I could apply it was to temporarily install Windows 8.1 on it as the Linux install seemed to uncover one dependency after another that unless you know Linux well, will lead to a strong desire to lob the box out of the window.

The box would be a bit physically big for me to just use as a router/firewall, but that's just personal preference; the real driver for me was space and power for 4/5 drives for my purpose. Maybe better off for a firewall picking up a slimline i3 workstation from fleabay and lobbing a low profile dual nic card in it; memory will be cheaper too.

@tinmanruss thanks for posting that. I have been considering many options and that would include a GIGABYTE N3050M mATX motherboard, which has a Celeron CPU which has hardware AES encryption built in. That is £36. Throw in a case, I have RAM and a PSU and I'm up and running.

This server is good for its cost, there is little doubt. But not everything changed for the better from the N54l, or even the Gen8 type.

No VGA, for goodness sake...!

N3050 is a horrendous processor compared to the G4400. But depends what your needs are i guess. For example you could run this setup as a PLEX Server transcoding no chance with an N3050

I've looked at buying something like this HP server in the past but have trialled Freenas etc on Virtualbox with some problems. e.g. Installing, using two virtual HDDs, then trying out "disasters" like corrupting/swapping virtual HDDs to see what happens when things go wrong....and I experienced some problems. Is this something that people here have already done using suggested NAS solutions like openmediavault? i.e. Have people used these NAS solutions and been through a drive failure without issue?

I'm curious as to why software is even required; can the server not be set up with its own bios/hardware raid and then just some plain server software run on it ?

These are excellent value especially after cashback, you couldn't even build this for £164 never mind £104. However I'd like to echo what others have said and also share my experience. It isn't plug and play and HP have seemingly made it as awkward as possible to get this setup as a basic home server. They only have display port and I have tried a cheap DP to HDMI adapter and also a HP adapter and neither worked. I ended up buying a monitor from ebay for £30 but you could easily add a HDMI graphics card. I bought this ProLiant to replace my ageing and small Readynas Duo and as I've built 100s of desktop PCs in the past I thought this would be a breeze. I was wrong, I even had to rely on good old google and youtube to get this one setup. You have to change settings in the BIOS to even get it to boot from a USB (it doesn't come with a DVD drive). I managed to install Windows 2012 Server, however none of the drivers from the HP website worked, all of them said it was the wrong OS even though it wasn't, I suspect you can't do it the normal way, I did try to download the ssp iso but I had issues registering my ProLiant. In the end I downloaded the network drivers from the Intel website but there's still unknown devices left in device manager. I also tried Ubuntu Server but I found it was like going back to the 90s, having to use commands to get the basics installed. Back to Windows 2012 again, from there it has been so simple, I have now disconnected the monitor and mouse and hid the server away, its set to auto login and I simply vnc into it to set downloads off etc. For those thinking about using one these for NAS I'd definitely recommend it, don't worry about the relatively low specs as its been easily good enough to lets say, torrenting and also streaming 4k files across the network at the same time. I currently have Windows installed on a 120GB SSD and all my disposable files on a 4TB Seagate Ironwolf NAS HDD. Overall great little setup and I'm pleased

This or the MicroServer Gen9 ? Cant really see a reason to go for the ML10...

Youve setup a NAS with a single data drive? I too, like to live dangerously!

I don't need RAID for stuff that can easily be downloaded again. Saying that Iwill add more drives as and when I need them