That article was written way back in 2006. 2.5" in server environment is not new. My company's 1U and 2U server racks use 2.5" 10k Seagate Cheetah SAS drives. I think the main driving point behind the 2.5" form factor is the smaller size and lower power consumption. The downside of 2.5" drives is capacity but in a server environment and with RAID arrays, that is not a problem.

Wah, congrats. Where did you get it? What's the damage?

Thanks for the info. Wah, price went up already for the basic unit? Except for the upgraded processor, what do they give now for basic?

Yes, that should work. That looks like the same type of bracket that I pulled out from my old PC and put it at the top of my N36L.

Hmmm... Close to RM 400 extra for 250GB vs 160GB hardisk and 2GB vs 1GB memory. Oh, forgot about the faster processor as well. I guess the price is fine. Which HP shop did you get it from?

If the 250GB Seagate is anything like the 160GB that came with the N36L, then it should be fine. I put my 160GB Seagate in my N36L on the top where the DVDROM once occupied.

Actually, the Black was never marketed for NAS. I think you mistook the Black with the RE4 which is for NAS (like the WD Red).

Thanks for the heads up. Especially useful for people for pop in and who are not aware of the prices and what is the latest available from Synology. If one is prepared to pay the price of the DS412+, might as well go for the 5 bay 1512+ for a little more.

Anyway for people who are budget conscious and using simple file storage and DLNA sharing, the Synology does not make sense. As a comparison, you can get similar performance from the N36L Microserver with 2GB memory and equip it with 5 x 3TB drives in RAID 5 under WHS 2011 and you would arrive at the cost of a bare 5 bay 1512+ with zero drives.

Yeah, one can argue that the 1512+ has USB 3 and dual Gigabit ports. But with not so much money, you can equip the Microserver with a PCIe USB 3 card and a PCIe dual port network card in the x1 and the x16 available slot.

Depends on the capacity of the drives you select but RM 1k for a 4 to 6 disc setup is not possible I think. Taking the cheapest 1TB drives and you are already close to RM 1k.

If you're just looking for the enclosure alone, the HP N36L (not the newer N40L) is going for RM 699 brand new and it can be made to fit 5x 3.5" drives excluding the 160GB OS hardisk even though it's meant to officially fit 4 drives. You need to flash a modified BIOS and use a eSATA to SATA cable to re-use your external eSATA port though.

No experience with PS3 but if I'm not wrong, the server needs to decode the mkv before streming to PS3? Correct?

No problem. Before Merdeka, I bought 4 x 3TB WD Red drives, 2 x 8GB DDR3 and one N36L Microserver. Total damage is RM 3164. Running it since then. I like the Red drives a lot. Very silent and faster than my 2TB Samsung F4E.

So to anybody that is curious if the Microserver can take 16GB memory, I can confirm that it does. To anyone who has doubts if the 3TB WD Red (or any 3TB for that matter) works in the Microserver, I can confirm that it does.

Well initially when you don't have an OS installed, the BIOS does not know which drives are you going to use as a boot drive and therefore assumes that the 3TB drive is going to be used as a boot drive and as a result, the BIOS detects the drive as a 800GB ++ drive at boot up. After you installed the OS on the given 160GB Seagate drive, the BIOS will report the 3TB drives as 3TB.

You can get it at any HP reseller shops at Mid Valley, Low Yat Plaza or Digital Mall Section 14.

Nice find. But do you have the PC casing and power supply to go with the motherboard?

The Fractal Design casing is nice and so is the PC08 Lian Li.

http://www.fractal-design.com/?view=product&prod=42

http://www.lian-li.com/v2/en/product/produ...index=63&g=spec

Yes, you are right. It can do a lot of things because it's a full fledged PC. But a few things that C2D PC lacks is the size and power consumption it takes. The idea of a home server is that it's small and runs 24/7 which is nice if it's low powered.

Besides at RM 699, it's quite hard to build a PC with a nice compact casing that fits 5 drives.

Ok, thanks for the confirmation. If that being the case, a decent dual core is a must. I don't have any experience because I don't have any PS3 to test but from other N36L / N40L forums, I gather that it's a little hit and a miss thing. Mostly a miss that you get choppy performance when running the Microserver as a PS3 media server. You need a lot of CPU power to decode the MKVs especially 1080p and this is talking about the more powerful N40L.

Anyway, as a suggestion you can slap in a HD 6450 card, install Windows 7 and use it as a HTPC. If you don't have a HDMI receiver to decode audio from the HDMI output from the graphics card, you can use USB audio stick instead for analog audio out.

You need a HDMI receiver to decode the sound on the HDMI.

Which one are you looking at that is 8xx? Those Hotway Probox?

The one we are talking about can only be bought in those nicely decorated HP reseller shops. Looks like this;



RM 699 gives you the N36L cube with the AMD Athlon II Neo N36L 2x 1.30GHz cpu (much faster than most Intel Atom cpus) on a AMD RS785E/SB820M chipset, one empty 160GB Seagate 7200rpm drive, 2GB ECC memory (originally comes with 1GB but in this promo, they upgrade to 2GB memory for free), RAID 0 and RAID 1 support from BIOS, loads of USB 2 connectors (2 rear, 4 front, 1 internal), 1x eSATA, 1x gigabit network connection and a DVDROM bundled. It comes with a built-in graphic card (ATI HD 4200, not HDMI though). So you don't need to buy a graphics card to purposely make it work.

The N36L will originally come with the 160GB hardisk in slot 1 of 4. To get 4 pieces of 2TB or 3TB drives to fit in, you need to shift the 160GB drive up where the DVDROM should be located (who needs DVDROm when you have USB thumbdrives...) with the help of a 5.25" to 3.5" bracket. Use the extra SATA cable for the DVDROM and connect the 160GB hardisk to the SATA connector meant for optical drive on motherboard. The 4 slots in the N36L are RAID / AHCI suported. In order to enjoy AHCI support on that SATA connector meant for optical drive so your 160GB would run faster, you can flash a BIOS mod.

This 6xx NAS does not come with OS. It's like a mini PC that you need to install an OS for it to work. Unlike other types of NAS, there is one x16 PCIe slot and one x1 PCIe slot for expansion. It also has 2x DDR3 memory slots for you to upgrade your memory up to 16GB memory. So the possibilities are endless. The x1 PCIe slot you can add USB 3 card or even additional GB network card. The x16 PCIe slot gives you the possibility to add in a low powered HD 6450 card or you can opt for an even more powerful RAID card.

If you look around, there is no other 4 bay NAS as powerful, as configurable and as cheap that has the capacity to fit in 5 drives.

Sorry, don't have a Samsung Smart TV either. I have a dedicated HTPC connected to my TV and all my files are stored in the Microservers. Since the Samsung TV is DLNA certified, just make sure you can access the HP via DNLA or shares. I believe there are softwares out there to run the DLNA service on the Microserver. I believe the Samsung TV has it's own software that you can install in the Microserver to make it discoverable by the Samsung TV. There are also other software out there that you can try (Serviio, Mezzmo, Twonky etc) instead of the built-in Windows Media Centre.

Anyway, I've not had the situation where the Microserver needs to run a DLNA service that decodes the codec for the player on the fly but if you find it too much for the Microserver's CPU to handle, perhaps you can use a more powerful PC as a DLNA server instead and just use the Microserver a a place for storage. The more powerful PC will do the codec processing for you while the Microserver just acts as a place to stores your files.

Yes, you can install Windows 7 on it. I have one of mine on Windows Server 2008 R2 and the other one on Windows Home Server 2011.

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Added on September 8, 2012, 5:36 amAt the moment, the processing power of the N36L is fine for me as I use it just for storage space. More so for the price it's going for now...

This post has been edited by jchue73: Sep 8 2012, 05:36 AM

I took a look again at the AMD E-350 processor and found it to be much lower in terms of CPU processing power compared to the AMD N36L. So if I were given the choice, I would take the N36L of the HP Microserver instead of going the DIY route which is more expensive and still fall short in terms of performance.

Lucky you. My movies are typically 40GB sizes.

Windows Home Server 2011, Windows Small Business Server 2011 and Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 are all based from Windows Server 2008 R2 which closely resembles Windows 7 in interface. If you're very familiar with Windows 7, the above server softwares are not too much difficult to get used to. As the name suggest, WHS 2011 is more for home usage. For exact differences between the server OSes, just google it.

Anyway NAS like the Acer Revo Center RC-111 (similar to the size and shape of the N36/N40L in the way that they have 4 bays) comes pre-bundled with Windows Home Server 2011 and you run it headless because it does not come with a graphic card. Price is not too bad at RM 1159 but the N36L is way cheaper and many more times powerful than the Atom D525 in the RC-111. The other headless NAS that looks very good and has some nice server oriented features but still terribly slow in my eyes that comes pre-bundled with Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 Essentials is WD Sentinel DX4000. Nice but expensive and it only accepts expensive WD RE4-GP drives if I'm not wrong.

Ok, back to your real question...Usually if you have limited hardware resources, you could try to run only the Server Core of the Windows Server 2008 R2. The Server Core will install with basic function but without the heavy GUI. So meaning it's command line interface only. It's lighter on hardware requirements. Anyway, looking at what you want to use, the Intel N230 is a single core processor and way way lower in terms of CPU power when compared to the AMD N36L. Just like Windows 7, the more memory you feed it, the better it becomes. But then again, you need DDR2 memory for this. So basically, I don't know if it's going to be worth the effort reusing the old hardware.

Which Atom and mobo are you planning to get?

I'm a little old school. I prefer to run the hardisk in the NAS without power down. It's better and less stressful for the hardisk.

That's true but even then, you'd still find some problems playing certain files. Best, most powerful and most configurable is to run a HTPC connected to the TV. The trick is to get a low powered, small but powerful enough to play your files. The N36L or N40L (if you're willing to fork out extra) fits that bill nicely. Put in a HD 6450 graphics card and it can double up as a NAS and a HTPC.

Nowadays, raw CPU power is mostly not required to decode files. Perhaps only the older types might rely on brute CPU power but the trick to smooth playback of newer files is in the graphic card.

Bought my first N36L for RM 999 also. That time they give HP mouse, HP keyboard and HP DVDROM (not that I needed all of these). For the RM 699 price, they only give you the HP DVDROM but they upgrade from 1GB to 2GB memory.

You can find them at those nicely decorated HP reseller shops in Mid Valley, Low Yat Plaza or Digital Mall. At the moment, it looks like HP is clearing old stock of the N36L. Newspaper say that the N40L is around RM 1.4k thereabouts but to me, just a modest upgrade in the CPU and bus speed does not warrant double the price. Strange thing is I tried to look up for the N40L in those shops but everyone says no stock.

Not that it makes a lot of difference but the official Passmark scores are 803.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_lookup.php...+N36L+Dual-Core

This post has been edited by jchue73: Sep 10 2012, 01:11 AM

The D2500HN and the DN2800MT looks to be decently priced. I'm curious how many hardisk are you planning to run? These boards look to be more suited for HTPC use than for NAS since it only has 2 SATA ports. Paying that
much just for 2 SATA ports is not worth it.

I too am fond of using old hardware. Too much sentimental values. Anyway, I find that trying to maintain old hardwares to work better by updating them sometimes end up costing more than just getting a new platform. Some more their performance will not be as good as a new platform after being updated.

Anyway, interested to know what throughput you're getting from your network card. PCI theretical max is 133MB/s.

This one?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...N82E16813153212

Nice find but Newegg sells them for USD 205. That's RM 640 without shipping, without casing and without memory and without boot drive ! Furthermore, the Atom D525 is way lower in terms of CPU power compared to N36L (PassMark 714 vs 803).

If you're willing to go for the Atom D525, might as well get Acer's Revo RC111 that gives you 2GB memory, 1TB hardisk, 4 bays (albeit one bay taken up by the 1TB hardisk), 1 x gigabit port etc for RM 1159. The cube chassis is slightly smaller than the N36L / N40L.

Yes they do on both. I'm currently running 4 x 3TB = 12TB hardisk space and 2 x 8GB = 16GB memory in one of my N36L. I believe if you can find 4TB hardisk, the N36L can even support 16TB.

When the N36L came out, that was back in 2010. Largest hardisk were 2TB. So therefore officially, the largest supported was 4 x 2TB = 8TB.

On memory, if I'm not wrong, there were no 8GB DDR3 memory module DIMMs back in 2010. Largest was 4GB and therefore officially, max is 2 x 4GB = 8GB. Anyway, you'll find reports that some 8GB DDR3 memory modules from some manufacturers are not compatible with the N36L or N40L for that matter. I can safely say that the 2 x 8GB Kingston DDR3 memory modules work in the N36L. I've read reports that while some memories work in the N36L, the N40L is a little more picky and that detection of 2 pieces of 8GB DIMMs were a hit or a miss. After several reboots, only 1 can be detected and sometimes if you're lucky, both can be detected.

I must qualify myself and explain a little more in detail. For support over 4GB memory, you would require x64 OS (64 bit).

Sorry, I missed that info you given earlier. Yeah PCI SATA cards are cheap and it's just at the limit to saturate gigabit speeds. You need to check compatibility with the PCI SATA card because they are usually much older and would probably not support the newer hardisk.

That's true. But, computer got tax?

Can you try the numbers below?

http://h20426.www2.hp.com/campaign/kungfup...rs_p_pinang.pdf

I'm not familiar with Penang but the shop facade must look decorated like this;



I think if you're just running it as a storage server, should be fine. The E-350 is actually quite famous for HTPC usage though because of the built-in HD 6310 GPU.

Oh, if anybody wants to have enterprise support from HP, one can opt for the HP Care Packs for the Microserver.

This post has been edited by jchue73: Sep 10 2012, 10:04 PM

Yes they can. The N36L / N40L are x64 processors are come with Virtualization technology built-in which are critical for Hyper-V. Just don't expect enterprise grade performance. Home usage is fine.

Sorry lah. That's all I can find. I do not work for HP and neither am I a Penang lang.

Anyway, you can always walk into the big shopping malls and I'm sure you'll come across those dedicated HP shops that sells HP notebooks and desktops. Chances they have the Microserver is very high.

Bought mine on the 3rd Floor. Same floor as the rest of the computer shops. Mobility Square Sdn Bhd.

Mid Valley seems very limited the time I asked. Good to hear 1 Utama actually has a display unit because the other time when I asked about a month ago, they didn't have any to show. Best is Low Yat I think. It also used to be that All IT carried them but not anymore.

Anyway, it's very strange that the newspaper says HP Malaysia has it but the shops do not carry them. They even publish the RM 1.4k + price. I think they are just waiting for the N36L stock to clear before they start to sell the N40L.

Yes, the Acer is the other alternative. Not too bad but the Atom D525 is not as powerful as the AMD N36L. When it comes to low powered stuff, AMD seems to have things sorted out.

Under 1k? The N36L is the only one I can think off.

What's the Singapore price?

I actually came across the RM 699 promo by accident when I enquired about the N40L. Then I saw they list the N36L as having promo. I thought it was just one shop but it turned out that other HP reseller shops in KL / PJ are having the same promo / offer. Perhaos not sanctioned by HP themselves but something the reseller does to clear their old stock.

Yes, that's the price of the N40L from newspaper. But the HP reseller shops could not (or probably would not) quote me the N40L.

Saw the N36L promo starting about 2 months ago if I'm not wrong.

That's not too bad. Seldom see HP stuff below the price of what they advertise in the newspaper.

There were many times in the past months that HP advertised in the Star for the N40L. Just flipping the ePaper in my phone on one of the past papers from July 30th and I got it on page 4 on Biz News section or page 60 of 72 as a whole main paper.

Don't know much about Ubuntu but have you tried different cable? Perhaps tried different router?

Why can't people read? I just replied on post #1256 just above a few post before this.

This post has been edited by jchue73: Sep 13 2012, 03:08 AM

Congrats. He gave you an additional 2GB memory stick? Wah, lucky you.

The hacked BIOS can be used on both the N36L and N40L.

Interesting. Have you checked if after install in the N36L, there is space to fit two drives on top of each other?

Yup. You need the hacked BIOS though and a eSATA to SATA cable which is very difficult to find.

Where got such thing as hardware RAID without additional cost? If no cost, try the built-in software RAID in the Windows Server 2008 R2 under Dynamic Disc.

That's cool. What transfer speeds were you getting from the RAID card? Do you still have the IBM RAID card? Might be interested.

If you mean software RAID under Dynamic Disc that you get from Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Home Server 2011 or Windows Storage Server 2008 R2 or Windows Small Business Server 2011 or Windows 7, yes it affects the speed. I have not tried myself perhaps those with experience can post some figures.

Anyway, this is what I get using RAID 0 from the N36L BIOS (aka Fake RAID) under RAIDXPert with 4 x 3TB WD Red drives;







Yup.