when are you planning to get 2? maybe buy more can get cheaper

thta's almost half price now... getting really pissed now! Back then, my N40L has to be ordered from HP Sg to get it shipped over by my HP distributor... and now it is available here at half price..errrr.

Yours shipped from SG not as bad as mine shipped from UK. But at least mine shipped to my door only about RM800 also la. Took 4 months plus to get here though.

My new house is in a mess at the current moment. I think you need to buy 10 or more to get quantity discount as the price is already on promo.

I have a mind to convert it to a dedicated HTPC or just stick with it being a NAS. But if NAS, I need to hunt for hardisk first.

By now, you guys should know that's the price you pay for being early adopters. But then again, for how long have you been enjoying your N40L already?

As it is all black in color and a relatively 'small' footprint, it goes very well with the AV system color in general, so jchue73's suggestion to make it into htpc is good.. much better than any external usb hdd enclosure+movie player. a good wiki site on this discussion point : http://n40l.wikia.com/wiki/Graphics_Cards

This post has been edited by numbertwo: Jan 3 2013, 12:29 PM

want to ask,
using window server or open nas is better?
currently all my drive is ntfs format..
do i need cooling if open the system for 24/7?
also if i build 1, what spec is better?
or got any complete system?

Yes, that's a great resource site. The trick to adding a standalone graphics card is that the graphics card needs to be low profile type and low power too.

Oh, the OS would then need to be Windows 7.

No experience with Open NAS but I hear the read / write performance of software RAID from the *nix based OSes are usually lower than the ones from built-in Windows OS.

I put 2 N36L stacked one on top of the other in my study with no external fan or aircond. Theyy are switched on 24/7. Each N36L loaded with 4 hardisk. But hardisk is the 5400rpm type (i.e. WD Red and Samsung F4E). If you use 7200rpm hardisk, heat may be a problem.

Complete system? Try WD Sentinel DX4000 or Acer Revo RC111. Both runs on Windows Home Server and runs headless without monitor. The Sentinel only works with RE4-GP drives.

You can build your own with a similar or more powerful spec but the casing will be a problem. For a small footprint, you can try and source something like the Fractal Design Array R2 casing or Lian Li PC-Q08 casing but they will be expensive. Price wise, you cannot get something small, relatively powerful and configurable than the Microserver

You will need to provide more info before anybody here can really answer your question. Right now it is way too generic.

what are you trying to achieve? Is it just a pure NAS or do you have further plans for it that you need the Windows license? Some examples are running web/media servers and UTM services.

if you plan for just a simple NAS with 5 or less concurrent users a newer Atom processor is enough. You should ask yourself how much data and what storage plan you want, i.e. what RAID level so that you can workout how many HDDs you need.

If you are looking for a DIY system I think I speak for most here by recommending the HP Proliant Microserver. If you are looking for a Out--the-box NAS there are plenty to choose from Qnap and Synology. Just name your budget.

---

Added on January 3, 2013, 4:36 pmjchue that is an interesting statement that I was trying to find out about when I was setting up my N40L but could not find any resources on that matter. The only comment I found last time was that whatever the deficiency in Linux based OS in requiring more CPU cycles are easily addressed by today's CPU's computational capacity. It would be interesting if there was some solid quantitative data on say the required CPU overhead for a Linux OS vs Windows for RAID.

This post has been edited by CocoMonGo: Jan 3 2013, 04:36 PM

Acer Revo RC111 can get on malaysia? if can get around how much? estimate...

-----------------------------------
not running any services, just plain data storage..
the only user will be me only.
budget around 400-800 depend on the system can support how many drive...
[cos last time my desktop which house 6 of my hdd fail which bad sector 2 - 3 of my hdd..
that why want to find solution for data storage.]

hp microserver is back in action, i see. Definitely the best solution in terms of price/performance/flexibility.

Those interested can read my review on N36L. LOL...long time never update my blog. Too busy already.

http://www.miniservernation.com/2010/12/ex...nt-microserver/

BTW, for the person asking about the noise. I can say this is one of the most silent NAS I had tried. That main fan from the server is actually very silent. The noise you hear is from HDD. 4-5 hdd definitely will make a bit of noise. However, you can setup what I did.

dvdrom slot -> change to 160GB hdd
sata slot1 -> 1 tb
sata slot2 -> 1 tb
sata slot3 -> 1 tb
sata slot4 -> 1 tb

Sata slot 1+2 = 1TB RAID1
Sata slot 3+4 = 1TB RAID1

To reduce the noise, I have all the 4 sata hdd set to sleep after 10min inactivity. Downloading of torrent and so on all uses the single OS hdd which is the 160GB HDD. This is more than enough to cater temporary storage for my working files and torrent.

So at night when you sleep, only 1 hdd is running. Very silent.

This post has been edited by abubin: Jan 3 2013, 05:09 PM

If that is the case the Acer Revo and Proliant Microserver should serve you well without problem. However neither system will meet your budget constrains as HDD costs are high. Your best bet would be to get an existing computer lying around the house and rebuild using a new Atom or AMD E350 APU boards. Some of these boards has 5-6 SATA connections plus 1 16x PCIe slot which you can get a RAID card for but then again those cards are not cheap.

When you say 6 of your HDD fail... were they all at once? Coz that would be really really rare if not impossible without external factors like lighting strike or something. What ever you plan none can replace the fact that hardware still fails and you will still need backups of your data.

I've no concrete evidence or data. Just some observations that I see from people posting their results on FreeNAS etc is very slow compared to those running Windows.

I did see it at the Acer shop ground floor Digital Mall at Section 14 PJ. You can also try All IT at the same place upstairs. Saw it there too. Price is RM 1k thereabouts if not wrong.

Interesting setup you have.

Regarding sleep, I don't like to do that on the hardisk. I personally prefer them to spin constantly. Powering the hardisk on and off wears the hardisk dramatically.

Now that I got my Level 2 gigabit switch up and running, next project I'm looking at is adding dual port gigabit card in the N36L and try to do LACP.

Depend on your usage. My server is used for mostly backup only. And DLNA server once a while to watch movie from the backup. So I hardly read/write from the main storage. Usually that 160GB is sufficient for most stuffs.

Spin up or down 1-2 times a day is fine. A laptop hdd would spin-up/down even more in a day.

I guess for your case, it makes sense.

My downloads go straight into my server. And that goes on throughout the day.

I turn off that power saving feature on my notebook when my notebook is connected to the wall plug. I try not to use my laptop on battery and only use it when necessary.

Remember, you have one more HDD for general usage. For my case it's the 160GB that comes with the microserver. That 160GB can store a lot of files already. Don't tell me 1 day you can download more than 100GB. I only need to move the files to 1TB storage around once every 2-4 weeks.

This 160GB can die anytime. I don't care. It only store temporary files. At most I lost few weeks worth of download. Small price to pay for prolonging life of my main 4 HDD. That's where the important stuffs are. Less heat. Less noise. Reduce chance of failure. Increase lifespan of the HDDs. Perfect setup for me.

I agree..this setup is not for everyone. Different people have different needs.

I have roughly the same setup with you. I have pretty aggresive spindowns times for the 3.5" disks. But I have another 2.5" OS HDD that runs constantly. Every torrent is downloaded into the 2.5" but once completed I had Transmission (the Torrent downloader on Ubuntu) move the files onto the 3.5" HDDs automatically. Other than that I have twice weekly scrubs of my ZFS pool carried out automatically. The only problem I have though is the lag I am experiencing when accessing the 3.5" due to the spin up time

my budget is for the casing only...
hdd will have other budget....
6 hdd, 2-3 die at same time, the other still safe....

the acer / hp come with os or blank?
will those shop have stock aroud march cos i only go kl at that time...

how to order the n40l from hp?

expensive~

Errr... My one day download can be more than the capacity of the 160GB drive. That drive remains as an OS drive for me which still has plenty of room. So that is why my normal desktop downloads and other downloads go straight to the 4 drives of the N36L.

Of course the lag time... You cannot have the best of both worlds.

6 hardisk? Very difficult to find small casing to fit all of them. You probably need normal mid size ATX casing in which case you can customise and probably get cheaper.

For the fault tolerance you're looking, you need RAID 1 mirror.

HP does not. Acer comes with Windows Home Server.

Go to the HP shops in Lowyat or Digital Mall?

What is expensive?

My setup is basically all using gigabit cables. Raid 10.

BlackArmor NAS 400 [+ 4x3TB WD Red] -> 2 LAN cable -> ASUS N66U Router -> UniFi Router

And copying files to the NAS is like

Win7 -> HomePlug 500mb (1/2 gigabit?) or WiFi N 5G, full bar -> ASUS N66U -> BlackPondan 400

using CIFS/Samba, drag+drop: highest is 2MB/s with HomePlug. With 5G WiFi it's 1.2MB/s
using FTP: 1.5MB/s x 3/4 concurrent file transfers, but ONLY after I disable user accounts and access rights (as in, enable public share only). Currently using this way.


There is no setting for jumbo frames, or any other optimisation/customisation in the BlackPondan 400 page. So I have no idea if it uses 4k or whatever.


seriously this thing is a piece of crap. very, very underpowered. Checking BlackArmor support page is just full of complaints of similar crappy performances by other users. Only BlackArmor 440 model (with seagate's own harddisk, but not available in Malaysia) is generally (almost) reliable.

There is a custom linux firmware that someone developed for this thing that supposedly (drastically!) will improve the performance. I'm gonna try it on the free unit. quick question, if I move the 4 harddisks to this other unit, will the raid be rebuilt or it will detect straight?

but whatever it is, if you guys have any other tip (other than carrying my 30KG super PC downstairs to connect to the router straight ) I'm all ears. If I can get 20MB/s transfer also I'm happy! Right now the general understanding/consensus to improve the performance in BlackArmor forum is to do these things:
1. disable access rights
2. transfer using FTP
3. install the linux firmware



This post has been edited by C-Fu: Jan 4 2013, 12:16 PM