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I'd love to see a 6 bay HP MicroServer. I too have a Gen8 and my only real complaints are: max 16GB of RAM, and only 4 drive bays which sorta limits you to RAID

I'd love to see a 6 bay HP MicroServer. I too have a Gen8 and my only real complaints are: max 16GB of RAM, and only 4 drive bays which sorta limits you to RAID10 as a best compromise. In the newest model they've rotated the bays to be horizontal and made it half the height; but I'd love to see that same idea at the original height with a few more bays. It'd be a cracking little machine that way. My MicroServer has the E3 Xeon (which was a pain to find in the UK, had to buy the chip off eBay in the end) and for a home server it's pretty stellar. I do want something more powerful for a headless workstation though.

411111111111111 6y ago
You probably want to use raid10 anyway though. Parity raids are dangerous if you don't have a full backup of all data, as recovery stresses all disks, increasing the likelihood of a second and consequently full failure significantly.
- robotmay 6y ago
  I do keep a full off-site backup of all the important stuff at least :) Yeah RAID10 is a bit of an oddity. I definitely think it's the way to go on 4 disk setups, as it has the same failure level as a RAID5 but with significantly faster resilver times (i.e. both can lose any 1 disk and recover). RAID10 could theoretically lose 2 disks and recover so long as they're not in the same mirror pair. After that it starts to feel like a bit more of a gamble though as you _could_ lose all disks in a single mirror on larger arrays. Say with 12 disks and a RAID7 setup (I'm converting from ZFS setups which is what I know :D) compared to RAID10; you could in theory tolerate notably more disk failures (50%) in RAID10, but you could also take 2 failures in the same mirror and immediately lose data. But yeah the resilver times are horrible even when just mirroring two drives on my server, so I'm definitely wary of the stress resilvering a RAID5-7 array will put on the disks. I think my ideal setup would be two servers with RAID10 arrays mirroring each other. Or I suppose with ZFS you could create two RAID10 arrays in the same machine and then make them a mirrored pair. Which would be entertaining, but I have no idea what RAID number that converts into!

411111111111111 6y ago

You probably want to use raid10 anyway though. Parity raids are dangerous if you don't have a full backup of all data, as recovery stresses all disks, increasing the likelihood of a second and consequently full failure significantly.

robotmay 6y ago
I do keep a full off-site backup of all the important stuff at least :) Yeah RAID10 is a bit of an oddity. I definitely think it's the way to go on 4 disk setups, as it has the same failure level as a RAID5 but with significantly faster resilver times (i.e. both can lose any 1 disk and recover). RAID10 could theoretically lose 2 disks and recover so long as they're not in the same mirror pair. After that it starts to feel like a bit more of a gamble though as you _could_ lose all disks in a single mirror on larger arrays. Say with 12 disks and a RAID7 setup (I'm converting from ZFS setups which is what I know :D) compared to RAID10; you could in theory tolerate notably more disk failures (50%) in RAID10, but you could also take 2 failures in the same mirror and immediately lose data. But yeah the resilver times are horrible even when just mirroring two drives on my server, so I'm definitely wary of the stress resilvering a RAID5-7 array will put on the disks. I think my ideal setup would be two servers with RAID10 arrays mirroring each other. Or I suppose with ZFS you could create two RAID10 arrays in the same machine and then make them a mirrored pair. Which would be entertaining, but I have no idea what RAID number that converts into!