NAS attempt - HP Microserver Gen8

[porina]

 

This little box is something I picked up ages ago to make a 2nd storage box, as I wanted a better backup strategy. It never happened. The Gen8 microserver really is a server. I have an older generation one and it is basically a normal PC. Here we get all sorts of management stuff I'll never use, as well as an abundant lack of drivers. It takes FOREVER to get through the bios before it even starts loading the OS.

 

Not a problem for NAS software? I tried FreeNAS but didn't get along with it. Win10 more or less worked, Win7 kinda did with a lot of kicking. Not the sort of thing you want to rely on keeping your data safe with! So it got ignored until I heard via Linus about Unraid. Time to give that a go!

 

 

The unit has 4 drive bays, shown here with one old 3TB WD Red. There's a 2nd fitted also for testing purposes, with the other two bays empty for now. These drives have been in use 24/7 in my old machine for several years so I'm not confident in using them without redundancy any more.

 

 

This was the lowest model in the range, with a Celeron G1610T dual core running at 2.3 GHz. This model came with a single 4GB stick of DDR3 1600 ECC ram, but I got a matching 2nd one to go with it.

 

 

On the other side we see a little expansion possibility. There's a PCIe 16x slot, but it only takes half height cards. There's a micro-SD reader as well as an internal USB. I'll be using that USB for the Unraid install, with a 16GB Sandisk Cruzer. 16GB is overkill but there wasn't much of a price difference to the smaller sizes so if I decide I don't like Unraid, it could still be used for other things.

 

That's it for now. I've already prepared Unraid 6.1.9 for it, so now I just need to check the bios settings and boot up for the 1st time.

 

 

[porina]

7 minutes ago, AlexTheRose said:

Those pics are hotness, I swear. Everything from the case’s front panel to the gorgeous WD Red drives, to the mainboard PCB and RAM sticks.

 

Good work mate!

Thanks. Must make time to get back into my old photography hobby again. Those were quick and dirty pics. Would be better again if I thought the effort was worth it.

 

Elsewhere, it has booted and I've installed the trial key. Now to work out how to use the rest of it. Already it is working better than FreeNAS in that Windows found it without me having to do anything at all!

[porina]

Ok, it's going to be an overnight job to "prepare" the disks. Actually, I'm quite tempted to put a 3rd one in to see how it handles adding one after, but I can't reboot it now. The WD reds have had over 2 years powered on. My other spare drives are WD greens so that could get interesting...

 

Very much liking the web interface. Looks simple and easy, although I'll reserve final judgement until I've actually created a share and tested its performance out.

 

Assuming that checks out, I'm thinking ahead about getting a bigger drive for parity to save on possible problems later on. Vague plan is perhaps 6TB or bigger disk as parity. Use my two old 3TB reds, and once I've moved the data from my main desktop over, the 6TB red in there can move over into the 4th bay for a combined 12TB of storage.

 

I might even convert my old backup system over! That has 4x3TB drives with no redundancy since it is only for backups. They're not NAS drives either.

[porina]

I got a 3rd disk in there now, a WD green with 4 years powered on logged! Both share disks are formatted and available, but parity is estimating as needing over a day to complete.

 

I did create a share which was trivially easy and did a test file copy. This was flying at first, going about 90MB/s which is quite close to the practical limit for gigabit ethernet. Then it crashed to ~25MB/s after a while. I'm not sure why this is, does it cache writes in ram (high risk?) or is this something to do with parity? I'll have to try again once parity has finished building.

[ddbtkd456]

3 hours ago, porina said:

I got a 3rd disk in there now, a WD green with 4 years powered on logged! Both share disks are formatted and available, but parity is estimating as needing over a day to complete.

 

I did create a share which was trivially easy and did a test file copy. This was flying at first, going about 90MB/s which is quite close to the practical limit for gigabit ethernet. Then it crashed to ~25MB/s after a while. I'm not sure why this is, does it cache writes in ram (high risk?) or is this something to do with parity? I'll have to try again once parity has finished building.

It has to do with unraid I believe, I'm not an expert but I've heard of unraid doing weird stuff like this. You could do dedicate a SSD for a cache and this might help. A helpful thread is one I started on another forum (link here).

[porina]

5 hours ago, ddbtkd456 said:

It has to do with unraid I believe, I'm not an expert but I've heard of unraid doing weird stuff like this. You could do dedicate a SSD for a cache and this might help. A helpful thread is one I started on another forum (link here).

That thread is a mess I'll have a good play with performance once parity finishes building on mine (20h estimated left) and see where I go from there.

[ddbtkd456]

3 hours ago, porina said:

That thread is a mess I'll have a good play with performance once parity finishes building on mine (20h estimated left) and see where I go from there.

Haha yea I agree with you but specifically pages 3 and 4 have some good information on them. Let me know what you get for speeds tho I'm curious.

[porina]

The parity creation is now done and I did a quick test from my Windows 10 desktop, connected by gigabit lan. I selected about 5.5GB of large files (smallest is 500MB) which are on my SSD, and dragged it over to a share on the unraid box.
 

 

I saw a similar pattern to that when I first tried it, in that I got around 90MB/s write to start with, then it drops down to 25-30MB/s, where it stayed. I noticed the CPU indicator on the server was hovering around high 40%, or most of one core. I have to wonder if the CPU is effectively maxed out doing parity calculation?

 

 

Here I reverse things, and copy the same files back to the PC in a new folder on the SSD. This looks better, near enough saturating the gigabit interface.

 

So overall, it looks like this will be good for reads, but a bit sucky for writes.

 

I'll have to research some more into what limits write speeds. I'm not sure I want to go to a cache disk for the type of use here. I am debating getting a further two 3TB Reds to match the pair I have already, giving 9TB usable storage. At the lower write rate, that would take continuous 4 days to fill up.