Unfortunately, this deal is no longer available
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765°
Posted 1 September 2014
HP Proliant N54L Microserver £137.88 inc VAT & delivery (£99.54 after £30 Cashback) @ Serversplus
Shared by
juliocaesar
Joined in 2014
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4
About this deal
This deal is expired. Here are some options that might interest you:
AMD Turion II Neo N54L Dual-Core (2.20GHz 2MB), 4GB (1 x 4GB) PC3 DDR3 ECC UDIMM, 4 x Non-Hot Plug 3.5in SATA, No Optical, 1yr Parts Only Warranty
More details at Community Updates
205 Comments
sorted byWe all need more Microservers!
Server or sofa?
hotukdeals.com/dea…561
We need the gen8 microserver on cashback!
www8.hp.com/us/…860
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To be honest if you want "simple" NAS with no setup get the WD.
If you want a flexible solution that can be a high spec NAS using (XPEnology or FreeNAS) or a full server, media streamer or even a fully featured PC then get this.
Personally I couldn't recommend these highly enough I have 3 of them.
Depends what you want to use it for and where you pc skills lie. Linux is the best free solution (I recommend Kubuntu) but it's more difficult to set up if your a noob but faster than windows it will boot in 10-15 seconds
XPEnology is simple to setup, fast and does enough for 90% of users I.e. includes RAID, Plex, DLNA etc as standard plus it boots from usb so leaves all bays available for HDDs.
Windows is easier to use and setup but bloaty, expensive and slower.
That's like saying there cannot be a hot deal on ram ever again because 2 yrs ago 8gb used to be under 40 pounds and it's never going to be that cheap ever again.
Personally, I don't think the microserver makes for a very good virtual host due to lack of CPU power. Entirely depends on what you'll be doing of course. Great for a couple of VM's for light duties (domain controller, DHCP, DNS etc) or playing around.
nope, SATA
Thanks, just got a 2gb stick matching the current stick for £11 delivered.
The Microserver is up and running now, with an SSD and 3 WD Red 3TB HDDs in Raid 5 now (will be 4 at a later date). It was a long winded process getting the data off my NAS, but it's done now.
OK. First step I did was to make sure that the RAID1 status on my NAS was "healthy". In my case, it was "degraded", so I ran a repair to make sure that the two drives were perfectly mirrored. That took a few hours.
Next, I shut down the NAS and removed one of the HDDs (in my case Disk 1) and rebooted the NAS to make sure that the file were all intact and the NAS was functioning as normal, with just the one HDD and it was, i.e. the NAS was functioning normally, but in a "degraded" state.
Then, shot in the dark and being a Windows Server n00b, I thought I'd see what the Microserver/Windows Server thought of the Linux formatted NAS HDD that I'd just removed from the NAS, so I put that in and booted the Microserver, which is currently running Windows Server 2012. As I suspected, the Microserver was unimpressed and didn't even see the drive.
I took the HDD back out of the Microserver and popped it into a spare 3.5" HDD enclosure that I had kicking around and formatted it in NTFS, using my laptop (I don't have a desktop).
I plugged the USB from the enclosure into the (slow as hell) USB port on my NAS, tranferring the 2TB+ of files from the NAS to the newly NTFS formatted HDD. Transferring the data took a LONG time (Zyxel NAS).
The good news is though, that in the meantime the NAS was running fine.
Once all of the data from the NAS was transferred to the HDD, I popped it back into the Microserver, took the second HDD out of the NAS and fitted it into the Microserver and fomatted it to NFTS.
By this time, my new HDDs (courtesy of Flubit) had arrived and I configured them to RAID5 and transferred the data between the drives on the Microserver, et voila!
There's probably a quicker and simpler method of doing this, but this worked for me, with the limited amount of NAS HDDs I had at the time.
I have Plex running on the Microserver now and it's nice and slick.
I didn't go for any more RAM, but I did buy a USB 3 PCI-E card and an Asus AMD Radeon R7 240 2GB DDR3 GPU as add-ons.
Hope this helps?
This graphics card I bought recently for my microserver.
ebuyer.com/387…10l
It has a low profile bracket and fits perfectly into the limited space.
For your purposes, you need not go for ECC RAM, which will bring the price down somewhat. Here's an example for under £23. Basically any 4GB 1333MHz DDR3 Unbuffered Non-ECC DIMM will do. There's more information to be found online, like here. ECC stands for Error Correction Code. Memory with ECC will look through the data looking for errors and if it finds some it will correct them, but it's pricey. ECC memory is basically only for pro-Servers, rather than a home server such as yours and isn't really needed. It also brings down performance a little bit.
As for the GPU, it depends on your budget and what you need? You can go for anything from this HD5450 with benchmarks around 232 for just over £20 (when you buy the additional low-profile brackets) and up. I went for the ASUS AMD Radeon R7 240 2GB for £50, which has a benchmark score of 965 and is overclockable. Others have gone for a GT610 which is cheaper at around £34 from Amazon, but has much lower benchmarks at around 353.
Just make sure that the GPU comes with a low-profile bracket.
Hope this helps? There's loads more info at the Official HUKD HP Microserver thread and the HP Microserver Wikia. (edited)
That's not the only thing you need to watch out for. The graphics card should not be thicker than one slot including cooler. Otherwise it won't fit. Also, the specs of the Microserver say that you can only draw 25W from the PCIe slot. The graphics card I recommended is only one slot thick and draws 29W and runs here without problems so far. But I wouldn't push it much higher.
A quick Google and mixing ECC and non-ECC seems ok, in fact, the ECC RAM will revert to non-ECC mode and run a little faster.
However, mixing registered and un-registered RAM is a no-no.
I thought Hitachi HGST drives were top dog these days?
Was checking this out earlier may have to invest again.
Also got free Hp 3 year cover
(edited)
So can u tell us any thats cheaper
Can they be set to wake on LAN activity instead?
(edited)
So this is a good deal at the mo.
Heat applied.
Imo, these just aren't fast enough for desktop usage. It might have something to do with mine running Windows Server 2012 R2 but sitting down at mine for maintenance whilst it's working on a server task makes for some painful wait times if I just open a tab in Firefox and try to do something else. Guess it's the 2GB memory in them.
Mine gets used primarily as a NAS over Gigabit ethernet. HD streaming, music over the network in Foobar, Plex and general backup. WOL set up on mine so its just a case of plugging into LAN and firing a magic packet for it to boot up. Great little machine but Windows Networking can sucks bowls sometimes.