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I'm surprised I don't see more people with my NAS setup. I run a HP Gen8 MicroServer which cost about £120 for the base machine a few years back. The default sp

I'm surprised I don't see more people with my NAS setup. I run a HP Gen8 MicroServer which cost about £120 for the base machine a few years back. The default specs were a bit feeble but perfectly serviceable for running a NAS, though mine has now been modified a bit since then to sport a quad core E3 and 16GB of ECC RAM. If you pick up an adapter lead you can fit an SSD in the optical drive bay (which I have done). One nice thing about the microserver is it has two built-in ethernet ports, so mine run in a link-aggregation group, which is well utilised (I run a lot off this little server, like Plex, ZoneMinder etc). I run ZFS on Ubuntu (ZFS is superb and one of the best things I've learnt in years) with a RAID 10 setup (2x2TB mirrored pair, 2x4TB mirrored pair). I'm actually just resilvering one of the 4TB drives right now as I finish migrating to them from a couple of old 1TB drives. RAM usage was high when I used dedup but now I've ditched that it's running much lower. I think the hardware will start to struggle once I get up over 10TB of usable space, but considering the cost of the actual machine I really don't feel like I've wasted any money at all. I picked RAID 10 for this because I feel like with only 4 drives available it makes the most sense, weighing up resilver speed vs slightly better failure recovery if it was RAIDZ. On bigger servers I tend to go for RAIDZ3 instead. For backups I use syncthing on various machines to copy data to the server, and then rsync the stuff I care about every hour (with a lockfile to stop overlap) to rsync.net, which then performs all the snapshots. I used to run borg but I swapped back to plain rsync because I felt more confident in being able to restore from it. rsync.net is fantastic. I'm currently storing about 1TB with them, and although it looks more expensive than other options for home backup, I feel like the lack of hassle is really worth it for me. I'm not usually a fan of HP btw, but these little microservers are really well built and I actually ended up using a ton of them at work as well; we only ever had one failure (which I believe was due to PoE somehow being delivered to it, which was really fun to debug :|). When this one eventually can't keep up I suspect I'll just go for a newer model of it. The form factor is very convenient for the home, especially if you don't have the convenience of a spare room in which to put a rack.

imaginator 7y ago
I'm running a very similar setup. One of the HUGE benefits of these boxes is the iLO for fixing grub, / hardware changes / etc. Saves schlepping a motitor and just makes life so much easier.
- robotmay 7y ago
  I must admit that I never got around to setting up the iLO interface on mine! It's on my list of things to do in the next few months as I've finally got my home network set up how I want it and a large enough switch sat next to it now :D
- pnutjam 7y ago
  Most people don't realize you can ssh to ILO and use it to access a virtual serial port on your server. That gives you console access without an ILO license. It can be a little complicated depending on your Linux, but if you google "ILO virtual serial port" you should be able to find some decent directions.
d_k_f 7y ago
A second vote for HP's Gen8 MicroServer! I couldn't get the low voltage Xeons for a sane price in Germany, so I settled for a second-hand i3, which turned out to be more than enough for what I'm throwing at it. I'm running ESXi as a hypervisor managing two Ubuntu VMs at the moment: a router and a fileserver managing two volume groups (6 TB dump storage for movies, music, etc. that's not too important and thus unmirrored, 2x2TB mirrored storage for photos and other important data that should not get lost). Thanks to the two network ports I can completely isolate the fileserver from the open internet as only the router VM has access to hat port. If I want to access my stuff from outside, I can VPN into the router and thus have access to the fileserver. The next points on the list is Plex or something similar so I don't have to manually re-encode movies when my TV doesn't like the audio codec. Here, the i3 might struggle a bit, but we'll see. As for the cost: I spent 200€ on the server itself, 88€ on 16GB RAM, ~20€ for the SSD case and power adapter cable and ~65€ on the SSD. The i3 was ~25€, so I'm up to roughly 400€ for the entire server (plus storage costs, but you'll have those anyways). Compared to what you'll get for that price it's an absolute steal, especially when you compare it with several "low budget"/homemade NAS builds floating around the net/youtube. Bonus points: you can stack them on top of each other.
- NeedMoreTea 7y ago
  Heh. I've still got a gen7 happily chugging away - it is happier streaming 1080p x264 rather than x265, but aside from that we never notice it's so feeble. That's easy enough - we only rip x264 now. It's heavily used, ZFS performs flawlessly - running on FreeNAS, and runs a surprising amount of plugins and jails without issue. I haven't looked at gen 8 or 10 - where was 9? - since the arbitrary HP switch in policy to say you need an active support contract to download a BIOS update. For most people buying a MicroServer that's BIOS updates in first year only, which is far too hostile. I'm more likely to self-build using a U-NAS 8 bay or something else with more bays next time around, or pick up a rack off ebay.
- robotmay 7y ago
  Yeah those E3s are really awkward to find. I ended up buying it secondhand from the US for about £85. I think you'll be fine with the i3 for Plex encoding though; I can get a few decent streams going on mine before it starts to tax it. I used to run a dual network setup similar to that actually, and had my server's only access to the internet via a VPN tunnel on the router. I've stopped doing that recently as I got more interested in the link-aggregation setup, but I might do something more complex at the router-end to achieve a similar outcome at some point.
cbzbc 7y ago
Well, part of the issue is that it's no longer available, and HP seem much more resistant to deep-discounting the Gen10 replacement.
- crtasm 7y ago
  Yep, and new old stock of the gen8 were listed around £400 last I checked. Any word if there'll be a new model that improves on the gen10?
- robotmay 7y ago
  I was still picking them up in the UK for about £120 until last year, maybe the stock has finally run out. I did notice that the price of the Gen10 does seem a bit steep, although I would say that the base specs are quite notably better than the Gen8 base model so perhaps it works out reasonable by that point. Mine has probably cost about £400 after the upgrades I made to it.
djsumdog 7y ago
Have you looked at syncing ZFS snapshots for backups? (that way if you just move a file, it doesn't reupload the whole file; just the disk metadata)
- robotmay 7y ago
  I did think about doing that but I actually choose not to do much in the way of snapshots on my server and instead use rsync.net's snapshotting, mostly to save myself money on storage costs locally (as files change quite a lot but I rarely need to restore anything). Not sure if the costs work out in my favour long-term or not so I might revisit that in future :D

imaginator 7y ago

I'm running a very similar setup. One of the HUGE benefits of these boxes is the iLO for fixing grub, / hardware changes / etc. Saves schlepping a motitor and just makes life so much easier.

robotmay 7y ago
I must admit that I never got around to setting up the iLO interface on mine! It's on my list of things to do in the next few months as I've finally got my home network set up how I want it and a large enough switch sat next to it now :D
pnutjam 7y ago
Most people don't realize you can ssh to ILO and use it to access a virtual serial port on your server. That gives you console access without an ILO license. It can be a little complicated depending on your Linux, but if you google "ILO virtual serial port" you should be able to find some decent directions.

d_k_f 7y ago

A second vote for HP's Gen8 MicroServer! I couldn't get the low voltage Xeons for a sane price in Germany, so I settled for a second-hand i3, which turned out to be more than enough for what I'm throwing at it. I'm running ESXi as a hypervisor managing two Ubuntu VMs at the moment: a router and a fileserver managing two volume groups (6 TB dump storage for movies, music, etc. that's not too important and thus unmirrored, 2x2TB mirrored storage for photos and other important data that should not get lost). Thanks to the two network ports I can completely isolate the fileserver from the open internet as only the router VM has access to hat port. If I want to access my stuff from outside, I can VPN into the router and thus have access to the fileserver. The next points on the list is Plex or something similar so I don't have to manually re-encode movies when my TV doesn't like the audio codec. Here, the i3 might struggle a bit, but we'll see. As for the cost: I spent 200€ on the server itself, 88€ on 16GB RAM, ~20€ for the SSD case and power adapter cable and ~65€ on the SSD. The i3 was ~25€, so I'm up to roughly 400€ for the entire server (plus storage costs, but you'll have those anyways). Compared to what you'll get for that price it's an absolute steal, especially when you compare it with several "low budget"/homemade NAS builds floating around the net/youtube. Bonus points: you can stack them on top of each other.

NeedMoreTea 7y ago
Heh. I've still got a gen7 happily chugging away - it is happier streaming 1080p x264 rather than x265, but aside from that we never notice it's so feeble. That's easy enough - we only rip x264 now. It's heavily used, ZFS performs flawlessly - running on FreeNAS, and runs a surprising amount of plugins and jails without issue. I haven't looked at gen 8 or 10 - where was 9? - since the arbitrary HP switch in policy to say you need an active support contract to download a BIOS update. For most people buying a MicroServer that's BIOS updates in first year only, which is far too hostile. I'm more likely to self-build using a U-NAS 8 bay or something else with more bays next time around, or pick up a rack off ebay.
robotmay 7y ago
Yeah those E3s are really awkward to find. I ended up buying it secondhand from the US for about £85. I think you'll be fine with the i3 for Plex encoding though; I can get a few decent streams going on mine before it starts to tax it. I used to run a dual network setup similar to that actually, and had my server's only access to the internet via a VPN tunnel on the router. I've stopped doing that recently as I got more interested in the link-aggregation setup, but I might do something more complex at the router-end to achieve a similar outcome at some point.

cbzbc 7y ago

Well, part of the issue is that it's no longer available, and HP seem much more resistant to deep-discounting the Gen10 replacement.

crtasm 7y ago
Yep, and new old stock of the gen8 were listed around £400 last I checked. Any word if there'll be a new model that improves on the gen10?
robotmay 7y ago
I was still picking them up in the UK for about £120 until last year, maybe the stock has finally run out. I did notice that the price of the Gen10 does seem a bit steep, although I would say that the base specs are quite notably better than the Gen8 base model so perhaps it works out reasonable by that point. Mine has probably cost about £400 after the upgrades I made to it.

djsumdog 7y ago

Have you looked at syncing ZFS snapshots for backups? (that way if you just move a file, it doesn't reupload the whole file; just the disk metadata)

robotmay 7y ago
I did think about doing that but I actually choose not to do much in the way of snapshots on my server and instead use rsync.net's snapshotting, mostly to save myself money on storage costs locally (as files change quite a lot but I rarely need to restore anything). Not sure if the costs work out in my favour long-term or not so I might revisit that in future :D