CONCEPT DESIGN - HP microserver 11 Drive edition


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Thought I'd post this - Just for fun!!

 

I found this bit of kit whilst doing some (unRAID) research, it turns a 5.25" drive bay into a 6 drive caddy for 2.5" drives.

 

I know its unlikely that you'd get more than 1TB in a 2.5" drive at the minute, but with 3TB drives in the main 4 bays, it would (in theory) mean you could get a whopping 18TB in a microserver!!!

 

HP-ProLiant-Mediaserver_6_drive_bay.JPG.28b02a620bd5397a13d629dfccd409c7.JPG

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Hi Neil

 

As the old saying goes - There is nothing new under the sun! Trust the ozzies, eh.

 

Well I did say it was just for fun. I recently bought the N36L after reading your post (and being swayed by the £100 cashback), so I will almost certainly be following your post when it comes to filling mine up. Currenly I have just two drives in it. I have suspended any further HDD purchases in light of the current "madness" concerning HDD pricing! Hopefully the weather out there will subside and they can get back to normal production levels again soon.

 

On a moer serious note though, can you please explain yuour comments about not using 2.5" disks in unRAId builds? I am a total noob to unRAID so am keen to understand the reasons why this is not recommended?

 

My long term plan once I have filled my HP box is to build something a lot bigger, I was thinknig of the Define XL case with its 10 internal 3.5"'s and then putting a 5 in 3 cage in to take it upto 15. This leaves one 5.25" bay free and I would have considered using the 6 (2.5") caddy featured in my photo to give me 19 drives in total. However, if there is some technical reasons why 2.5" drives are not such a great idea, then I'd probably try and squeeze two 3.5"'s into the last bay with an X-swing. Would you think that would be a better option?

 

Also, just out of interest. if the unRAID PLUS licence goes upto 6 disks, does that include a cache drive if you opt for one or can you have 5 x DATA, 1 x Parity + a cache drive?

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The only reason I wouldn't use 2.5" drives is cost. What's the point? Compare the cost of 6x 1TB 2.5" drives to 2x 3TB 3.5" drives (assuming pre-flood prices).

 

In theory, you could save power, but if the 3.5" drives are powered down, I'm not sure that'd be the case. And the HP Microserver uses very little power even with 6x 3.5" drives.

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Ah, yes, Power - that could be an issue. I hadn't even considered that.

 

I was more concerened it might be something to do with the performance of 2.5" drives (as far as I know they perform the same as 3.5" drives).

 

Out of interest, I thought I read on here somewhere that unRAID couldn't work with 3TB drives anyway? Or was that an old post and whatever problem there was has been fixed now? I assume you can put 3TB drives into an unRAID build can't you?

 

 

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Out of interest, I thought I read on here somewhere that unRAID couldn't work with 3TB drives anyway? Or was that an old post and whatever problem there was has been fixed now? I assume you can put 3TB drives into an unRAID build can't you?

 

Beta only supports 3TB drive.

with the beta version you could have 6*3TB drives installed + a small space for another 2.5" HD under the 5 1/4" bay.

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Like the concept!  Sure 3.5" drives are cheaper per GB, and will likely remain so for some time, but there's still other benefits to 2.5" drives such as lower power consumption and lower heat production.  SSDs are even better in both departments, but of course they are far more expensive.  I imagine a server like this working well for a small business with two tier storage needs - 3.5" drives for mass storage, and 2.5" SSDs for fast access small file storage.

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@nick

 

I looked at the "X-swing" device for mounting two HDD's in a 5.25" bay but wondered if you would actually get 2 HDD's in the HP box due to the optical bay being totally enclosed (as opposed to a tower case where there is a bit of space between each bay), do you know if two HDD's will actually fit the optical bay in the HP microserver? I think I will deffo go down this route as it will let me get maximum value (i.e. 6 drives) out of a PLUS licence.

 

@Raj

 

Many thanks for the compliments on my 'design'. Sadly its not unique as the ozzies beat me to it! But you raise a good point it would be a great way to maximise the space in the HP box, mixing, HDD's with SSD's.

 

For me the HP box is going to be a temporary solution as I plan to build a much bigger box in the not too distant future. Currently looking at stuffing 18 drives in a DEFNIE XL case. That should feed my media habit for all of 18-24 months. I must figure out how to get my hands on a full 19" rack from work. ;-) Its a shame unRIAD is limited to 21 drives otherwise the Lian Li cube would be a fantastic project to mimic with its 36 drive capacity!!! Breaking the 100TB barrier - now that would be fun!

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Its a shame unRIAD is limited to 21 drives otherwise the Lian Li cube would be a fantastic project to mimic with its 36 drive capacity!!! Breaking the 100TB barrier - now that would be fun!

 

Build it!

 

Toss 2 unraid servers in one box with ESXi. See if you can top it with a 42 drive build..

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Now there's a thought, I never thought about the virtualised approach, so in theory for every VM you can support upto 21 drives - Is that right?

 

Ah, but how does that work with the USB keys for the licence registration, surely you only can put one USB flash drive in the system with one UNIQUE UID?

 

What sort of hardware spec would you need to support say, 3 VM's runing unRAID with 21 drives per VM? Plus maybe another VM to run SAB, SickBeard and CouchPotato

 

 

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Now there's a thought, I never thought about the virtualised approach, so in theory for every VM you can support upto 21 drives - Is that right?

 

Ah, but how does that work with the USB keys for the licence registration, surely you only can put one USB flash drive in the system with one UNIQUE UID?

 

What sort of hardware spec would you need to support say, 3 VM's runing unRAID with 21 drives per VM? Plus maybe another VM to run SAB, SickBeard and CouchPotato

 

 

doing a fully populated 3 VM unRAID setup using ESXi would be possible.  The hardware would be intersting to try and figure out and probably be expensive.  You would also need more than one PSU to support all those drives...

 

Would be a fun project to try... but sadly I am not rich.

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Neither am I - Not by a long shot!!

 

As I said "Concept" - purely the stuff dreams are made of for me I'm afraid

 

No, my real life plans don't stretch farther than squeezing 17/18 drives into a DEFINE XL case I'm afraid, and I wont be starting that till next year when my Little HP box is full.

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@nick

 

I looked at the "X-swing" device for mounting two HDD's in a 5.25" bay but wondered if you would actually get 2 HDD's in the HP box due to the optical bay being totally enclosed (as opposed to a tower case where there is a bit of space between each bay), do you know if two HDD's will actually fit the optical bay in the HP microserver? I think I will deffo go down this route as it will let me get maximum value (i.e. 6 drives) out of a PLUS licence.

 

Yes, there are dozens of us using an X-Swing or similar. Plenty of headroom. I actually put 4x 3.5" drives in that space (photos are in my thread), but I didn't leave them in there, just kept 2 there. Putting 6x 3.5" drives and 2 or 3x 2.5" is trivial.

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Now there's a thought, I never thought about the virtualised approach, so in theory for every VM you can support upto 21 drives - Is that right?

 

Ah, but how does that work with the USB keys for the licence registration, surely you only can put one USB flash drive in the system with one UNIQUE UID?

 

What sort of hardware spec would you need to support say, 3 VM's runing unRAID with 21 drives per VM? Plus maybe another VM to run SAB, SickBeard and CouchPotato

 

 

Super sized Case or DAS boxes.

Three nRAID VMs, and 1 desktop=

1x Server Board with VT-d (plenty to choose from)

1x low end to mid range Xeon (I5-I7 (non K) would do the trick if your board supported it)

8+ gigs of ram (16+ would be recommended but not needed)

3x HBA's that support SAS expanders

3x SAS expanders.

4x Flashdrives.

1x datastore hard drive.

storage drives = more drives than i care to count...

1x Big UPS (optional but highly recommended)

 

It would all run really smooth. I bet you could even run all 3 parity checks at once and not have issues... or even tax the system.

 


 

as far as the 11 drive HP... I can see pros and cons for it...

I just cant see it being cost effective to use the laptop drives (1 for cache is fine)

I know the whole heat vs power thing... but what is the power draw and heat of 4x laptop drives vs a green 3.5" drive?

probably not enough to offset the cost. if you had the drives already. nice... sdd's when they come down in price.. sweet...

 

if you have no budget... dropping an areca 12xx card into the PCIe slot and then the 4 to 6 2.5" drives (or SSD's) as a hardware raid 5(or6) cache drive would be massively awesome.

you would have killer throughput (disk IO) and decent amount of space for cache drive only use. in a 2 tier storage solution similar to what Raj was thinking.

before this hard drive shortage, I was picking up 500GB 7200 RPM laptop drives for $45.

6 of those in raid 5 = 2.5TB with 500MB+ read/write... your bottleneck would be the network.

you then have the unraid drives for the bulk of your storage..

 

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@nick

 

I looked at the "X-swing" device for mounting two HDD's in a 5.25" bay but wondered if you would actually get 2 HDD's in the HP box due to the optical bay being totally enclosed (as opposed to a tower case where there is a bit of space between each bay), do you know if two HDD's will actually fit the optical bay in the HP microserver? I think I will deffo go down this route as it will let me get maximum value (i.e. 6 drives) out of a PLUS licence.

 

Yes can confirm the x-swing device for mounting 2 hdds will go in the 5 1/4" bay on the hp box.  Its slightly bigger (in height) , but the top of the hp box has a small gap and it fits no problem at all.

 

I currently use it , the gap between the hard drives is approx 2mm (i think) , temp on  hard drives in 4 disk bay are approx 30c, 2 hard drives in the optical bay sit at 34-36c (36c is the cache drive which runs at 7200rpm, the 34c is a WD green disk)

 

I actually bought 2 of the x-swing devices (price difference between buying 1 including p&p ,and 2 including p&p , meant that the 2nd device cost not as much) (Bought it to sell, to justify buying the orignal one!)

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How much are they anyway?

£7 odd, + p&p (something tells it was about £5,hence why i got 2) , they ship from germany to the uk, then get reposted again via royalmail..

 

And where would you recommend buyuing them in the UK?

http://www.aquatuning.co.uk/product_info.php/info/p6594_Nexus-Double-Twin-HDD-decoupling.html

My 5.25" bay in the HP microserver is fully enclosed so if two HDD's are thicker than one bay then I am not sure how that will work!

The lid slides off the top of the hp microserver, to reveal the bay. 

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Ah, yes, Power - that could be an issue. I hadn't even considered that.

 

I was more concerened it might be something to do with the performance of 2.5" drives (as far as I know they perform the same as 3.5" drives).

 

Out of interest, I thought I read on here somewhere that unRAID couldn't work with 3TB drives anyway? Or was that an old post and whatever problem there was has been fixed now? I assume you can put 3TB drives into an unRAID build can't you?

 

In general, 2.5" drives are noticably slower than 3.5" drives (other than raptors which are 2.5") although the system would most likely be limited by the speed it can calculate/write parity anyway.

 

Just doesn't seem great value for money really as they are significantly more expensive and not available in the same capacities at the upper end of the scale.

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