Geeky Goodness. The HP N40L Microserver thread.

That is a great deal then. Will wait and see what is delivered.

I got a 2GB DIMM in my two N40L's rather than the 2x1GB that some people here have got. Should be reasonably easy to make a few dollars back selling them to someone who still only has 1GB on their N36L.
 
Yay! ECC-tastic... took the opportunity to acquire a Seagate External 2TB drive too (on blowout and the last one in stock within 300km of me) for £50 - except when I went to pick it up the box was crush damaged (not in an important place) so I cheekily asked for discount - another £5 off.

Stripped the drive out of the external carrier and slotted it in the chassis.

Took the opportunity to reinstall the OS to a USB key which I stuck in the internal USB slot with the net result that the power consumption at idle is now 21-22W (My old single drive NAS enclosure was 11W idle and did chuff all else)
 
Yes, I am trying to get a hold of some USB keys for mine. I'm all out of spares, and although EXSi can get away with 1GB keys I would prefer 2GB, and a good brand.

Went looking at a few places in the last few days, seems like many retailers are not ordering them until the new year for some reason. Might have to order some online.
 
Crumbs! Do people still buy USB sticks that small? Last 3 I've bought have all been 16GB jobs...
 
Yes, you can get 2GB but they are few and far between. First jumping off point is usually 4GB for around $10-$12 (6-7 quid?).

I would buy 16's but they are just not required. Kind of a waste if you ask me.
 
These are still going for around $250 delivered. Would you recommend one as a NAS or HTPC?

I need both but have neither.

I am still wondering about the bang for the buck htpc on whirlpool too. I've just moved house, so had to put the purchase on hold for a while, especially as i had no internet connection to speak of.
 
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Buy two. Throw a GT210 in one and load XBMC. Throw FreeNas on the other along with an Intel Pro NIC as the built-in Broadcom NIC has issues with FreeNAS.

Sorted.

These also do 16GB of RAM now, not officially supported but most sticks are shown to work.

Don't forget there is a Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/Microservers
 
/edit Bah! Paused too long over the buy button, and they sold out.

Hmm, thinking about it, for the minute I don't really need the NAS. With 4 or 5 easily usable drives capable of holding up to 15gb of data, I think I could just get away with the HTPC.

I used to be the geekiest person I know, but 12 years out of IT and I am starting to feel confused by it all. Even a few years ago I would have been all over this, but internet speeds in Cairns meant it wasn't worth looking at, and since then everything has moved on so quickly.

Will have to do some more research and see if that is possible, as well as seeing if I can do things like stream iview.
 
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Turned up today at work.

Got home, installed the ram and video card, plugged it in, turned it on, remembered I don't have a usb keyboard or mouse, or even the right type of video cable to plug it into my monitor.

Switched it back off, and will have to pop into work tomorrow despite it being a day off.
 
I'm not having a lot of luck here am I?

I now discover that the stick of RAM I bought appears not to work in the microserver.

It has been BSOD'ing with a "the bios in this system is not fully acpi compliant" message since the first reboot after installing Win 7 on it. Have finally seen today that it seems to be a memory issue, and when I go back to the stock 2GB of ram all is good.

Lets see what the suppliers have to say about this tomorrow.
 
eggbert said:
I'm not having a lot of luck here am I?

I now discover that the stick of RAM I bought appears not to work in the microserver.

It has been BSOD'ing with a "the bios in this system is not fully acpi compliant" message since the first reboot after installing Win 7 on it. Have finally seen today that it seems to be a memory issue, and when I go back to the stock 2GB of ram all is good.

Lets see what the suppliers have to say about this tomorrow.
Click to expand...

Bummer - major hassle :mad:
 
Mark1966 said:
Bummer - major hassle :mad:
Click to expand...

Surprisingly it is not that bad. The 2GB of stock ram seems to be working fine. I will upgrade, because I can, but I think for my purposes it only needs an extra 2GB or so.

I haven't tried any of my games on Steam, but then I never play them often, and don't own any cutting edge games anyway.
 
It's not for games.....

That said, if you want some 4GB ECC DIMMS then I will be upgrading mine in due course.
 
What use have you found for the microserver that it needs more than 8GB of RAM?
 
ESXi my friend. When you get to virtualization, you can never have too much memory or disk IOPs.

When you have a p410 RAID card which was standard in a DL380 G6 or G7, and put that into your Microserver, you have a very serious storage system with such a tiny CPU. The biggest issue now is enough RAM to run what I want - and that is a fairly serious Home ESXi lab plus some actual machines doing stuff!

Mind you I just racked two DL 380 G8's for work - each with dual Xeon E5-2650's (8 cores per CPU at 2Ghz), so 16 cores per machine and 32 hyperthreaded cores...... only 32GB of RAM in them now but that will double to 64GB each in reasonably short order. P420i SmartArray controller, 8x 1TB 2.5" 10K SAS drives...... I get about 6.5TB usable space per box in RAID5. Sitting in GlobalSwitch ultimo, now just waiting for the second box to get the SmartArray controller replaced tommorrow as it died after 3 days. Then I can really play.

Should be able to move P&C to that hardware soon enough.
 
ShoppingExpress have come to the game, and offered to replace or refund the $25 I spent on 4GB ram.

At the moment, the N40L seems to be happy chugging along on 2GB RAM. So if you are considering selling some RAM on in the not too distant future, let me know.

I think the next upgrade will be a SSD for the system disk which I will hide somewhere under the 5.25" bay. At present I just have the 240GB drive as the system disk, with a 3TB data drive, and a 1TB external 2.5" drive. I guess I should get 3TB drive and at least have RAID 1 running on it.

I got the XBMC Android remote app working this weekend, and it really surprises me how much I like it. The only problem with it I can see is that it isn't easy to change the volume using it.
 
This thread is kinda freaky, I bought one of these a couple of weeks before I joined up here. Like-minded individuals, clearly!

I've set it up as a NAS/occasional HTPC running Ubuntu, it's going really well. I don't know if anyone's playing in the P2P/usenet game, but I can highly recommend them as a download box with some configuration on Ubuntu.

Razormonsta, I wouldn't mind a a RAM upgrade if you were looking to sell me one (maybe 2) of the 4GB ECC modules in due course. If you're looking for a buyer now or in the future, hit me up mate.
 
looking to get one of these as a file server, as it will be much better than plugging an external hard disk into a router.
 
Slightly off topic - I thought of getting one of these for my media delivery system, but instead went for a Smart TV, 3TB WD Drive and a WD Live TV Media player. Does a fantastic job.

If I put another PC in the house I have to go down the path of structured cabling :(
 
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