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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
by 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 agoHeh. 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 agoYeah 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.