yup..thanks for the clarification...that's the answer i am looking for.

Well...basically I do not want to go for linux based RAID5 is because this will make recovery a hassle. Compared to BIOS/Linux raid1, I can recovery data easily by just plugging one hdd onto external hdd casing. So I would rather sacrifice the extra space for the data recovery.

Maybe i go buy the microserver this week....thanks for the advice....

No worries. Don't forget that you may want to add some memory too.

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Added on November 2, 2010, 6:15 pmI agree that the Microserver is a bang for the buck for those looking into a above average NAS. Well, the QNAP and Synology devices have their places. Their 2 bay solutions offer very good and fast solutions at slightly higher prices. If performance you're after, they don't dissapoint.

But when you go hit into 4 bay solutions, the QNAP and Synology devices become very expensive. When you compare that the Microserver has more flexibility, it's a no brainer. It would have been excellent if the AMD chipset supported RAID 5 onboard much like the Intel ICHXXR boards.

Anyway, I was very close to getting the Acer H342 homeserver but luckily they did not have that in stock. All this while, I was looking at QNAP and Synology NAS solutions but could never justify and pull a trigger on one. The first time I saw the Microserver at All IT and was very curious about what it could do. For the asking price, I was very sceptical. Did some googling and the flexibility of the Microserver was what attracted me. It's more flexible than the H342. I must say it's been one of my best purchases so far. If the Microserver had been built by some other capalang company, I would have thought twice before committing. But it comes from HP's Proliant server line and my experiences with HP so far has been very positive.

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Added on November 2, 2010, 6:28 pmForgot to ask... What kind of performance are you getting with that RAID 5 array?

My RAID 0 array maxes out the Gigabit connection at about 119MB/s.

Just for kicks, I rar-ed an 8 GB mkv file locally on the Microserver onto the RAID 0 array and it took 4 minutes flat. No compression. Just store. I took the same file and rar-ed it locally on my Quad core Q6600 o/c to 3.2GHz with 6GB memory. It completed the job 20 seconds faster only. That machine was running 2 x 320GB WD AAKS hardisk in RAID 0.

This post has been edited by jchue73: Nov 2 2010, 06:28 PM

The standard 1GB memory is sufficient for me as I am going to run linux on it which is low resource intensive. It's basically only for fileserver and torrenting. No need so much memory. Plus ram can always be upgraded anytime.

Ok. My rationale for upgrading the RAM from the get go is for smooth and fast installation. Furthermore, after you have set up and placed your cube nicely, you would feel very lazy to take out the wires and pull out the motherboard.

yes yes that is true plus another 1GB ram is so cheap...virtually cost nothing. However, I would rather spend the money to buy additional extended warranty. Dang...going to LYN to get it this weekend...has been a long time since I went there. Really hate the weekend crowds. Maybe I go on deepavali friday..I hope the shops are open.

3 x 1.5TB Samsung Greens RAID5, can't do a 4 x 1.5TB write test anymore as I have data on it, redid a read test on 4 avg is 201.0MB/s

Those write speeds easily saturates my gigabit traffic, but Samba doesn't really play nice with Windows clients so I had to FTP my stuffs over to be able to achieve full gigabit speed.

This post has been edited by mercindustries: Nov 3 2010, 11:52 PM

samba should be faster than ftp....however, no point having such fast hdd speed when the bottleneck is in the network.

How fast can you transfer files between your windows and this server?

How many SATA ports does the microserver have? 4 inlcuding dvd-drive? Thinking of putting 1 2.5" for OS only. IF 4 ports, then left another 3 drives for storage.

Not too bad for a softraid. I'll try and post some. Yeah, don't think can post write test since it's already half filled.

Anyway, on my other NAS box (NMH300), FTP is more stable for file transfer. If I do normal copy paste on large file tranfers, I get time outs with the NHM300... Not so with my Linkstation DUO which I bought later. Very stable performance. If I had known, I would have bought the Linkstation DUO instead of the NMH300. Nice interface but performance sucks.

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Added on November 4, 2010, 1:57 pmIt actually has 6... 5 internal SATA ports and 1 eSATA.

Out of the 5, 4 of them from the SAS breakout cable and 1 separate one directly from the mobo to the DVD burner.

I took out my DVD burner and put the 160GB Seagate boot drive there. The other 4 spaces are filled up with the 2TB Samsung F4EG drives.

This post has been edited by jchue73: Nov 4 2010, 01:57 PM

just curious since qnap/synology also work on linux/unix..

would it be possible to load up their OS/application onto the hpmedia server or any server for that matter ?

though its 5 internal sata ports, 1 is actually connected as PATA, whereas the other 4 is AHCI capable

abubin, unfortunately no, samba does not play well with my Win7 machine, only get ~30mb/s transfer only, probably i need to play around with the samba config.

JinXXX u could probably load FreeNAS on unRAID if you want purely NAS function on it (FreeNAS has nice ZFS support )

well...30mb/s is not bad. I mean how fast is FTP?

Do you really transfer so much files between your system that you cannot wait few extra seconds?

I just tested transferring from my server to windows 7 : 700MB took 27s at 25mb/s

FTP is about ~60-70mb/s, I had to transfer 1.5TB over so it was a very significant time difference

Very informative thread! After reading the last few pages you guys had me made up my mind on the Microserver. Currently thinking of using it on unraid or freenas, would like a simple fileserver setup as if install standalone linux very troublesome to troubleshoot if got any problems.

Currently I'm running DIY server with WHS but lately it's giving performance problems software issue the usual case with windows os, after using for sometime it's time for a re-format. So this time around would like to use unix/linux instead. Plus the hardware is getting a bit old better upgrade the NAS before the whole thing KO.

Any recommendations from the gurus here?

Thanks for the help

somehw i prefer the qnap x59 series casing lol..

yeah looking for nas + bt + monitoring application..

1k for the hp media server for 5 slots or 3.4k for qnap 559 pro... , somehw i like the gui..

thats why i asked since qnap is also linux/ubuntu based possible to load qnap's operating system over to the hp media server heheheh

surprisingly, the HP microserver comes with 160gb hdd. Available at All IT.

how much is it?

just found out syno has released the x11 versions

i believe the models is

211,211j and 111

211 has 1.6GHz + 256MB ram while 211j has 1.2GHz and 128MB and i believe the 111 is similar proc/ram as 211

This post has been edited by jinaun: Nov 8 2010, 08:49 AM

Small file transfers, the normal 2 bay NAS boxes are fine. I get about 30MB/s thereabouts with a Linkstation DUO and I'm pretty satisfied with the performance for the price paid. But if you start to transfer large quantity and large file sizes (not just Megabytes, but Gigabytes and Terabytes), the difference in waiting time will be more obvious.

On my Microserver, transfering an 8Gb file takes about 70 seconds or so.

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Added on November 8, 2010, 10:54 amI think the Microserver route with FreeNAS or Unraid is in the right direction if you just need a simple NAS box with lots of flexibility. Not forgetting that it's relatively cheap too.

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Added on November 8, 2010, 10:54 amHey, I like the Synology and Qnap too. But I dislike the price regarless of how beautiful the GUI is.

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Added on November 8, 2010, 10:55 am Why is it surprising? It's meant to be an OS drive anyways.

Well, I guess HP could throw in a 1TB drive instead like what Acer did with H342. The thing is I compared the street price difference between the HP and the Acer and with the price of the HP, you can comfortably add an additional 2TB with some spare change.

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Added on November 8, 2010, 11:12 amAny idea what processor is that? I think compared to the processing power and memory of the Microserver, I think it's not even close.

This post has been edited by jchue73: Nov 8 2010, 11:12 AM

i think its based on marvell kirkwood processor coz the memory interface is onli 16bit

u can't compare it directly to microserver coz one is ARM and another is x86..

This post has been edited by jinaun: Nov 8 2010, 11:23 AM