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So my HP Proliant Microserver rocked up today.

Immediately turfed the onboard micro SAS and plugged in my HP P400 controller out of an HP SB40c Storage Blade for hardware RAID 5 sexy times.

Tomorrow I've gotta go to MSY and pick up 4x 2TB WD 5400RPM drives and 8GB RAM to finish my setup.

Haven't decided on the OS to run though. Still thinking ESXi with 1 Ubuntu server VM. Altho OpenIndiana and FreeNAS all seem nice too.

So my HP Proliant Microserver rocked up today.

Immediately turfed the onboard micro SAS and plugged in my HP P400 controller out of an HP SB40c Storage Blade for hardware RAID 5 sexy times.

Tomorrow I've gotta go to MSY and pick up 4x 2TB WD 5400RPM drives and 8GB RAM to finish my setup.

Haven't decided on the OS to run though. Still thinking ESXi with 1 Ubuntu server VM. Altho OpenIndiana and FreeNAS all seem nice too.

Do the WD greens still constantly drop out of RAID?

oh and 5400 drives are for poofs.

Edited by DivHunter

Do the WD greens still constantly drop out of RAID?

Not sure, I did read about people complaining about them dropping out of RAID, but they were usually running some ghetto soft-RAID, not a hardware one. As with most manufacturers they don't gurantee the safety of the data on their consumer HDDs on anything other than RAID 0 or 1.

oh and 5400 drives are for poofs.

It'd be lucky to even break a sweat with a 4 HDD striped RAID. No need for 7200RPM when there's that much buffer and cache available. This is a budget setup after all and all up it's costing about $600 for a bulletproof setup. I'm not buying into the "green" marketing BS. It's just a better price and lower power consumption cos it's lower RPM. I only have peak 200W at my disposal, 50W of which is used by the board.

Not sure, I did read about people complaining about them dropping out of RAID, but they were usually running some ghetto soft-RAID, not a hardware one. As with most manufacturers they don't gurantee the safety of the data on their consumer HDDs on anything other than RAID 0 or 1.

Pretty sure I have seen them being dropped from hardware RAID solutions Dell PERC/Highpoint/Adaptec etc

It's a TLER issue, the green drives do not recover fast enough and are dropped from the array unless you can configure the timeout to something like 30 seconds. The newer drives should be able to have TLER enabled with a tool from WD.

have read the same thing divveh, though most of my workmates are running RAID5 in their home servers with the Intel chipset softraid and 1, 2, 3tb Caviar Greens fine, just gotta wait for some 2950's to reach EOL so we can scavenge the pci-e PERC cards out of them :D

Personally, I would avoid spindle drives made by anyone other than WD (ESPECIALLY Hitachi LOL), but that's just me.

Run ESXi on yo stuff, it's what all the cool kids are using for teh VM's! (if you are planning on running Media Centre etc from one you may find it fairly fail though!).

Ended up buying 4x2TB Seagate ST2000DL003's. Got them hooked up to an HP P400 in RAID 5... not the most secure RAID ever, but meh. Got the 512mb cache version with battery backup, so I can change drive RAID type and array number on the fly.

Got ESXi running off an 8GB USB stick inside the server, with an Ubuntu VM doing the fileserving and torrenting. I'm also trying out Solaris and FreeNAS in VM's too, but so far Ubuntu's probably the one that both easy and feature rich to use. Solaris is feature rich, but it's a PITA and regresses me to Uni days. FreeNAS is great for fileserving, that's about it. Really wanna try ZFS though, but running ZFS on top of a RAID is retarded.

Also ordered a HP N350T dual gigabit pci-e ethernet card so that I can dedicate the onboard port to interwebs, and two others to serving/streaming data over LAN if I ever need to.

Oh FFS! I just realised the drives I got don't support TLER. FUCK.

Guess I'll just have to run the SMART util on a cron to stop em spinning down. Gonna be fun booting it up though.

Alternative is to use the onboard sata controller with the drives in a ZFS config and use the SAS card to drive a JBOD setup later down the track.

edit: actually it seems like most of the guys complaining about the drives dropping out of RAID are because they drop out under heavy load or during startup. Both of those events trigger a high power draw, and looking at the drive specs, average power draw is 5.8W but when I hooked up my multimeter, on heavy load (random data written to HDD on all platters) and during bootup it was drawing around 22W. 4 x 22W = 88W power draw, which most of their NAS' would struggle to supply. The microserver should be OK since it has a 200W supply. Ah well, guess I'll find out shortly.

Awwww yeah. Went back to MSY and swapped the 4 ST2000DL003's for Hitachi 5K3000's. Which are fully supported by the RAID card. Fuck yeah Leo strut.

It took a bit of convincing (including one of the guys at MSY asking me why I didn't just test the RAID 1 array using one HDD :blink:) but got there in the end.

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