Ant

ATM I've got one that was given to me a cheap Chinese dual bay nas, it does the job all I use for really is movie storage photos, audio. Which I stream to my media player.

I want to upgrade to something that will run freenas, hold about 4 hdd's, gigabit (a must) it also needs to iTunes services and dlna which I believe is dorm to free nas more than the equipment.

Oh and cheap as chips. What you then fellas?

Graz

HP ProLiant Microserver when they are doing the £100 cashback offer, sadly not at the moment though. Four HDD bays + room for one, maybe two more internally, gigabit Ethernet, and you can run whatever the hell server software you want, personally I'm on Windows Home Server 2011

Ant

Cheers Graz , how often do these offers pop up?

LostUser

I'm pretty sure the microserver cashback has been running solidly for about 2 years.

It's still there on ebuyer now http://www.ebuyer.com/281915-hp-prol...ack-658553-421

However the price of the server does vary between £215 and £240ish during the year before the £100 cashback. £219 now, £119 with cashback, is an awesome price.

Ant

Awesome! How quick is the cash back?

LostUser

30 days or so, via a cheque

Ant

brilliant

LostUser

Most people tend to stick the 250Gb drive that comes with it up in the drive bay meant for the DVD drive leaving themselves 4 slots for hard disks. It's an easy mod and only needs a SATA cable and a drive bracket.

Alot of people run WHS 2011 (about £35) on these for the OS.

It's a real nice piece of kit

Ant

will it be fussy sharing with my mac ? if its through WHS?

Springs

iTrader: (4)

I've got a HP Micro server with the original 250gb drive as OS in the dvd drive and then 4 in the drive bays..

Running Linux as my OS and also have 4 more drives attached to the machine for more storage..

LostUser

WHS is basically Windows Server 2008 so the MAC can easily connect to the shares via SMB.

One of the best features of WHS is the backups. It can install a connector on every machine in the house and automatically backup the PC or MAC every night. It's a full image backup so if a hard disk dies on a client you just whack in a new disk, and restore from the previous night's backup. It's then back to exactly how it was before. It also means if you get a virus or something you just hit restore and you're back to how your PC was the night before you got the virus.

Ant

very impressive , my mind is made up

LostUser

Loads of info on the microserver here http://www.avforums.com/forums/networking-nas/

XRS

I'm running an HP microserver using OpenMediaVault. Fantastic OS, and it's free. Dose everything I need, streams over my network, easy(ish) to set up. Give it a go, but don't run it off a USB stick for too long, as it can kill them. I'm now using the 250Gb drive that came with it just for the OS.

Markus

You *might* need to run something like SMBUP on your mac(s) if you are using Lion or Mountain Lion as Apple changed things in regards to SMB. It's a package thing so easy to install, but worth remembering.

Stuffy old sod that I am, I tend not to be overly trusting of using OS X to connect to a server via SMB, and I'd rather go with AFP, which you'd need ExtremeZ-IP for (provides an AFP service on windows) as Server 2008 doesn't come with Services for Mac (not too bad a thing, it only supported AFP 2, and you'd really want AFP 3 support - long file names and a few other things)

That's why a *nix install would appeal on a NAS as you could run netatalk which is a *nix AFP service.

boomer

I received my (120 quid) MicroServer from eBuyer earlier today and i have to say - what a solid bit of kit!

The 250GB Seagate Baracuda 7200 drive have got to be worth 40 quid alone!

Solid chassis, four chunky drive bays, Allen key and spare screws - oh, and a power supply, CPU, motherboard etc.! How on earth do they do it for the price?

Tempted to buy another

mb

Beef

If you don't mind a bit of work to make a homebrew, the HP Microservers are very good.

If you'd rather not then Synology NAS devices can't be beaten.

boomer

Springs,

I now have time to configure my MicroServer and fancy sticking the (original) 250GB drive into the the top (optical drive) space.

As far as i can tell, you need a 5.25 to 3.5 inch mounting bracket, a Molex to SATA power adapter and possibly a SATA lead - is that all?

Also, does the "fifth disk" get adequate cooling 'cos it probably isn't in the airflow for the main fan?

Now i am waiting for the price if 2TB disks to fall before populating the bottom bays

Cheers,

mb

Springs

iTrader: (4)

not had any cooling issues with mine.

yes to the mounting bracket and data cable.

can't remember off the top of my head but im sure there should be power there already.

LostUser

These are really good instructions for putting the disk in the drive bay. The only bit that had me scratching my head was whether to get a right-angle or left-angle SATA cable. Didn't help that the picture on ebuyer was the same for both types. I think I just bought both in the end

http://paulroberts69.wordpress.com/2...roserver-n40l/

boomer

Thanks Springs - although i do think that you need the power connector convertor. Bought one on PC World this morning along with a SATA cable (already got the mounting bracket).

Cheers,

mb

boomer

Cheers LostUser,

Excellent instructions that give me the confidence that what i thought i was going to do is indeed what you do need to do.

Just hoping that my straight SATA connector will fit onto the motherboard (otherwise eBuyer will be getting even more of my hard earned )

mb