It’s back.

http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-proliant-turion-ii-n40l-microserver-100-cashback-658553-421

Proliant Micro Server for £150 (with cashback offer). Would go nicely with http://www.freenas.org/ and a brace of big hard disks, I reckon.

funnily enough I’ve been looking at NAS this morning and coudl do with some advice.

I’d like something with 2 drives that can be set up in a RAID array so I have a backup.

Primarily will be used for iTunes type stuff, sharing Office docs and probably accessing stuff over the cloud.

was looking at this with an extra drive added;

http://www.dixons.co.uk/gbuk/netgear-wireless-network-sata-2-bay-raid-hard-drive-itb-03990845-pdt.html

is the PC a better solution or is the p&p approach the netgear thing offers ‘good enough’?

Nice, but seems somewhat overkill for my needs – which seem to be amply coped with by my 1 gig via board server 😀

I thought this was about tennis

I’d like something with 2 drives that can be set up in a RAID array so I have a backup.

RAID is not backup.

but you have two copies of the current data in case of a drive failure?

I’m not worried about recovering deleted stuff – just not losing 500Gb of music if a drive goes.

Until the controller blows and takes out both copies, or data corruption gets mirrored across both disks.

is the PC a better solution or is the p&p approach the netgear thing offers ‘good enough’?

Ive got a 2TB Mybook World Edition and seems to hold up fine. I can watch a movie on my xbox streamed from the built in twonky media server. and can do a time machine backup from my mac with no streaming problems.

only problem is if you ever need to restore from the backup as it took a day for me to do that as it caps out at 12.5 MBps

Though I do really like the look of the synology NAS

I’m hoping to go this route in the future:

http://www.geeky-gadgets.com/xbmc-running-on-a-raspberry-pi-video-23-01-2012/

Will still need a load of storage somewhere but you could tape the actual media server bit to the back of the tv!

Maybe I need to rephrase this.

We have 500gb+ of music.

We’d like a networked storage solution that makes this music available to 2 standard pcs, 2 netbooks, 1 laptop, 2 iPhones and 2 iTouches.

We’d also like to utilise this storage mechanism for some office docs etc and use it in the same way that we might use dropbox to give ‘offsite’ access.

I’d like to avoid having all this on a single disk with no other copy available.

An NAS with multiple drives that allow multiple copies of the data to be maintained (either via a RAID solution ro some form of regular backup between them) would seem to meet this requirement?

but you have two copies of the current data in case of a drive failure?

But not necessarily in a format that anything else can read (as I discovered when one of our raid controllers died a few year back.)

…synology NAS…

Accepting Cougars valid points RE: data corruption, a Synology NAS setup as RAID1 with a couple of big disks is on my ‘things to do’ list as soon as funds permit….

Seen some good reviews on the HP, but this is v/tempting @£59 >>

http://www.mini-itx.com/store/?c=50

Virus, corruption, accidental deletion are some other issues raid doesn’t protect against.

I’m guessing you are looking at a 2 drive solution RAID 0 or 1.

Over a network, drive speed is not the limiting factor so RAID as a mirror is the only one worth doing.

The main advantage of mirror is up time – if a drive fails, you can access all your data and carry on working while you replace the drive and rebuild the array.

My NAS is running a mirror – but in all honesty it’s overkill for home – a regular removable backup is more useful (and also essential even with a mirror!)

Tempting to get one of these, 4x2tb disks and whack Nexenta on it. Not sure if the processor will be up to the task of running ZFS in raidz2 though.

HP have been running variants of this MicroServer offer for a year or so now. They’re really really good value. The CPU is virtualisation capable. They’re RHEL certified. Besides the 4 drive slots, the motherboard has a USB socket on it so you can run the host O/S on that & have the 4 drives in full 3+1 RAID5.

Most of my work colleagues have at least one. I’d say a majority have more than one 🙂

I use mine as a backup for my main server, with 4 x 1.5TB drives in RAID5. It’ll run backups of all my VM’s, including my VM that runs my NFS shares for music & video. The only other thing i needed to add was a second NIC.

These would make an ideal NAS. They’re whisper quiet. The build quality is excellent. The fan draws air directly over the drives so they’re unlikely to overheat.

One note of caution that a friend got bitten by. HP dealers are excluded from this offer. Buy from somewhere like EBuyer that’s actually advertising the cashback offer.

+1 to what Cougar & others have said about RAID not being a backup. The other thing i’ll add is whatever backup strategy you chose, regularly test that you can recover from it.

What courier does eBuyer use these days?

Sh*ttyLink?

HP have been running variants of this MicroServer offer for a year or so now.

Yup, but last I checked (which was a while ago, admittedly) the offer wasn’t around, which is why I posted it.

I have one of these servers and its really good. I have put 8GB of RAM in it and it easily runs 3 virtual machines under Vmware ESXI.

Cougar is right RAID is to save you from down time so you can continue working if you have a drive failure. Its not the same as a backup.

I use Crash Plan to backup to the cloud. It backs up my RAID 5 array that I use for business stuff as well as all the other rubbish I have.

Cute but not particularly good power usage which is a shame.

Waswlast – you sound like you are after something like a qnap.
Great bit of kit and it’ll backup to the amazon cloud if you so wish

Well, I thought I did too mrchrispy but that HP server looks like it’ll do the same job for a similar price but be more flexible about doing it?

We have 500gb+ of music.

We’d like a networked storage solution that makes this music available to 2 standard pcs, 2 netbooks, 1 laptop, 2 iPhones and 2 iTouches.

itunes match?

I’m really not convinced about having everything in the cloud, I’m happyt to use it as a backup medium or for sharing stuff but I’d like to keep control of the ‘source’.

A lot of my music is mp3’s generated from .wavs I’ve taken from vinyl and as such isn’t terribly well tagged etc

HP have been running variants of this MicroServer offer for a year or so now.

Yup, but last I checked (which was a while ago, admittedly) the offer wasn’t around, which is why I posted it.

Sorry Cougar, I didn’t word that very well. I was agreeing with you 😉

Same here. the last time i checked it wasn’t available. I suspect they dropped it temporarily to refresh the hardware specs – this one has a slower/newer CPU but twice the amount of RAM from last years model.

I wonder if they’ll keep extending this offer like they did throughout last year.

I took delivery of my new £119 Zyxel 2TB NAS from Dabs yesterday.

dlna media server
iTunes Server
Print Server
Torrenty stuff

Seems pretty good so far but only configured it and begun copying photo’s over last night. Tonight I might try streaming a movie to my ps3.

I bought the previous similar HP cashback deal that was doing the rounds mid last year, the Proliant N36L.

Nice little box. Very quiet. If this is the same box as the N36 (and it looks like it is) then you can mount the small included drive in the ODD bay at the top and stick an OS on that, leaving all the caddies in the main bay free for storage. (Google Prolliant N36 on wegotserved forum)
Bought Windows Home Server 2011 for mine (as it was on offer for about £30) and added a couple of 2TB discs. Should meet my needs for the foreseeable future. Works fine with Squeezebox too.

I’m still learning about it TBH but general concensus seems to be that it’s a very good, capable piece of kit.

Just before Christmas I set myself up with a Synology NAS (DS212j), started with a single 1tb drive, but will add another when the prices drop. I am running Sabnzbd and Sickbeard on it, so it automatically searches each day and downloads stuff I want, and I have paired it with a WDTV Live as well, so can watch stuff on my TV streamed straight from the NAS, really pleased with it!

I have the previous version of this server and its excellent. I run mine without a monitor with ubuntu server, i either connect to it and administer it over the web using webmin or via the console using putty.

for what its worth, i used to use freenas on it from a usb stick but freenas is too cut down to do what i want, my ubuntu install also has much faster transfer speeds for some reason.

they are quiet for a server but not especially quite even with a few eco drives in them. too loud for the front room.

Seriously havnt found an issue with mine yet.

Have read the above and some of the review comments on the site and don’t understand much of it – never heard of most of the software (and failed to love linux when I tried it once)

what would I do with this ?
(I have a “networked backup” using an ehternet port on an external hard drive attached to powerline adaptor)

do I need anything else (os, expertise, … ) ?

Did anyone have any issues getting the HP Micro Server £100 cash back? A guy at work just reminded me today and I realised I didn’t receive a cheque despite sending off the claim forms in February this year. I’ve email the 3rd party company, but not sure what to do if they don’t respond.

I use FreeNAS here at work – fairly basic setup, but works nicely. Data on it is ‘not critical’.

1 x Dell SC1425 server (2.8Ghz xeon, 256MB RAM)

2 x 2TB SATA drives.

1 x 4GB USB stick (for FreeNAS OS)

Each night, disk0 copies data to disk1 via rsync.

How grunty are the CPUs? I’m still thinking of using one of these with ZFS

edit: looks like it might be just the ticket

http://scott.buffington.me/entry/796/

MrGrim – My cashback took a while as well, about 5 months I think, I had forgotten about it but a couple of emails to the company administering the scheme and they paid pretty promptly after being reminded.

Cheers Mike, it sounds hopeful.

my N36L is still working flawlessly with ubuntu server. very pleased with it. I just installed upnplay on my GF new android phone and she can access all our video and music from her phone now.
She finally has a use for the black box in the spare room now 🙂

Have you lot heard yourselves?

Christ there’s some serious silicon cock waving going on here!