HP ProLiant MicroServer N36L Owner's Thread - Part 3

[neilybealy]

Ordered an n40l this morning

 

[dga]

Does in mine.

I've put an Icy Box IB-172sk-b in mine to get an extra 3.5" and 2.5" drive capacity.

It works with the existing single molex power connector in the upper bay, and accepts two sata connectors, the spare one direct from the motherboard and one via the eSata port on the back. Got the idea from someone that did the same earlier in an older part of this thread.

The review on Amazon is right in that the Icy Box does feel a bit flimsy, but it does the job well enough if you're not going to be wanting to open the drive bays too often.

I currently have the O/S on the 250gb drive in the 3.5" bay and intend using a 2.5" drive for the O/S at some point.

For the eSata to Sata cable I just got a cheap one from Scan. Ideally a shorter cable would be better so it doesn't take up as much room coiled behind the upper bay.

Now if there's an external version of this with a SAS8087 (sorry don't know the external version) style connector, I'm interested. I bought a 5.25 Blu-ray burner and use it too much to swap it for anything else.

 

[theronkinator]

Anyone fancy donating their 1GB ram for postage costs to help me out?

 

[bym007]

Anyone fancy donating their 1GB ram for postage costs to help me out?

I bought one of these off fleabay for a fiver, if that helps....

 

[coolamasta]

Has anyone in here used "TheBay's" AHCI bios update on their N36L? Reason I ask is because I updated the BIOS on the weekend and it still shows the drives are in IDE even though they are set to AHCI in the BIOS? See post #77 in here - http://www.avforums.com/forums/netw...6l-microserver-updated-ahci-bios-support.html

 

[qubist]

Anyone fancy donating their 1GB ram for postage costs to help me out?

Hi theronkinator, yeah drop me a note of your address and I'll drop it it the post to you.

 

[nix]

What are people using to make backups? I'm using an icybox so I've got 4 disks in raid. I can't remember what I connected to what etc. Can I use something like this? Icybox IB-366StUS2-B External Enclosure for 3.5-inch SATA HDDs: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories Did this have a spare esata connection?

 

[cruk]

Just wondering, has anyone applied the bios hack on their WHSv1? Do you need to do anything beforehand?

 

[ipguy]

just wondering if anyone has managed to get a SATA RAID card in the unit that can do RAID 5 and then plug the HDD's into it ?

 

[dga]

just wondering if anyone has managed to get a SATA RAID card in the unit that can do RAID 5 and then plug the HDD's into it ?

The HP P410 is a hardware RAID 5 card that supports hotplug SATA and is plug and play in the Microserver. All thats needed to be done is to unplug the SAS 8087 connector from the motherboard and insert it into the HP card.

 

[ipguy]

The HP P410 is a hardware RAID 5 card that supports hotplug SATA and is plug and play in the Microserver. All thats needed to be done is to unplug the SAS 8087 connector from the motherboard and insert it into the HP card.

well thanks great news... is this the card you suggest ?

 

[dga]

well thanks great news... is this the card you suggest ?

Yes. the bare minimum I would suggest for RAID 5 is the P410/512 with BBWC

The BBWC is the feature needed to almost eliminate write holes on power failure. RAID 5 really needs a lot of write cache to get good speeds. I use this config and get acceptable results. Below is the times/speeds from writing/reading a 1000MB file to an 8TB RAID 5 array.

This is from my ESXi shell:

/vmfs/volumes # time dd if=/dev/zero of=RAID5/test bs=1M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
real    0m 5.08s
user    0m 2.83s
sys     0m 0.00s
/vmfs/volumes # time dd of=/dev/null if=RAID5/test bs=1M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
real    0m 7.66s
user    0m 3.41s
sys     0m 0.00s
/vmfs/volumes # time dd of=/dev/null if=RAID5/test bs=1M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
real    0m 8.04s
user    0m 4.12s
sys     0m 0.00s
/vmfs/volumes # time dd of=/dev/null if=RAID5/test bs=1M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
real    0m 7.96s
user    0m 4.30s
sys     0m 0.00s
/vmfs/volumes # ls -alh RAID5/test
-rw-r--r--    1 root     root      1000.0M Dec 20 03:53 RAID5/test
/vmfs/volumes # rm RAID5/test

And from a VM:

[email protected] ~ $ time dd if=/dev/zero of=./test bs=1M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 23.4769 s, 44.7 MB/s

real    0m23.600s
user    0m0.030s
sys     0m20.889s
[email protected] ~ $ time dd of=/dev/null if=./test bs=1M count=1000
1000+0 records in
1000+0 records out
1048576000 bytes (1.0 GB) copied, 42.3107 s, 24.8 MB/s

real    0m42.337s
user    0m0.027s
sys     0m4.386s
[email protected] ~ $ ls -alh test
-rw-r--r-- 1 dgau dgau 1000M Dec 20 03:58 test
[email protected] ~ $ rm test
[email protected] ~ $

 

[ipguy]

the P410/512 is super expensive considering i'm going to put it in a $250 PC.
at $37 the 256 is fine as i'm not going to be using it for anything to intensive
it will more then likely be a FreeNAS device.

 

[dga]

the P410/512 is super expensive considering i'm going to put it in a $250 PC.
at $37 the 256 is fine as i'm not going to be using it for anything to intensive
it will more then likely be a FreeNAS device.

If you are going to use ZFS, do not buy a RAID card. You only need RAIDZ1 (like software RAID 5)

 

[ipguy]

will use freeNAS or a standard ubuntu 10.04 LTE as a NAS server.
just picked up the p410/256 for $37

 

[dga]

will use freeNAS or a standard ubuntu 10.04 LTE as a NAS server.
just picked up the p410/256 for $37

For ZFS you need to use the drives individually/JBOD so go with EXT4 or XFS on RAID. Regardless, that's a bargain price for a HW RAID card.

 

[ipguy]

For ZFS you need to use the drives individually/JBOD so go with EXT4 or XFS on RAID. Regardless, that's a bargain price for a HW RAID card.

for $37 i jumped on it pronto !
now that i think of it will probably end up being a Openfiler box

 

[nix]

Would this: LaCie Firewire 400 and 800 USB 2.0 PCI Card: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories fit in the server if I've already got a graphics card in there?

 

[dga]

Would this: LaCie Firewire 400 and 800 USB 2.0 PCI Card: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories fit in the server if I've already got a graphics card in there?

Looks full height me, no?

 

[nix]

Ah. Not noticed. Thanks. Any half height recommendations? Would this http://www.scan.co.uk/products/lyco...-(1394b)-and-1-port-firewire-400-(1394a)-card be ok?

 

[dga]

Ah. Not noticed. Thanks. Any half height recommendations? Would this http://www.scan.co.uk/products/lycom-pe-107-pci-e-2-port-firewire-800-(1394b)-and-1-port-firewire-400-(1394a)-card be ok?

I hope you're sitting down.

http://www.micom.co.uk/products.asp?partno=PEX1394B3LP&go

That's it, you picked the cheapest.

 

[nix]

Price isn't too bad, but what's the difference between the two?

 

[dga]

Nothing on a practical level as far as I can tell. Go with Scan.

 

[cruk]

Can anyone link me to a working esata cable? The 0.5m i got from ebay didnt work.

 

[dga]

Can anyone link me to a working esata cable? The 0.5m i got from ebay didnt work.

Almost forgot you...

http://www.amazon.co.uk/product-reviews/B00681P1F4/ref=dp_top_cm_cr_acr_txt?ie=UTF8&showViewpoints=1