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HP Microserver - Need some advice (Noob alert!!)


zambeezi

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Hi.

 

Currently I am running PMS on my windows pc and stream to a rasberry pi (plexbmc). I want to get rid of the pc as it taking up a lot of room (desk, screen, speakers, etc.) and I do have a laptop that I can use to access the NAS/server.

 

All I need it to run is the following:

Plex Media Server

Sickbeard

Sabnzbd

 

I've looked at Qnap and Synology but to seamlessly run my "setup" will cost way more than I am willing to spend - £200 budget.

 

The plan is to keep my current drives with all my media on it and use a SSD for the OS. Having done lots of reading it looks like a HP microserver would be the best option but just want to make sure it is possible... Any recommendations/advice would be much appreciated.

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I have Xpenology running on the older Gen7 HP 54L Microserver, last time I checked you can pick one of these up for about £170 from amazon. the newer Gen8 is more powerful (and IMHO better looking) but costs significantly more. If you already have the hard drives then I would buy some extra RAM (comes with 2GB as standard, but will take up to 8GB) This will run Plex, but the CPU is not very powerful (2.2GHz AMD Turion II dual core) so if you are wanting multiple HD streams or a lot of transcoding, it may not be up to the job. If you just use your Raspberry Pi, then you should be fine. Only issue you may hit is that if your existing drives are formatted with NTFS, then Xpenology wont read them from an internal connection, and you would need a USB adapter. What I did was copy 1TB of stuff off of the 1TB hard drive I was using onto a USB drive, formatted the internal drive for Xpenology, then copied the media back onto the drive. I have ordered a hard drive caddy to transfer the rest of the data over.

 

Have a look at Xpenology.nl as they have some user guides and things on there that might be useful

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Thanks. I'll take a look at Xpenology.nl... I've been trolling Ebay for a N54L for some time now but I can get the gen8 for about £170-£180 with the HP cashback offers. Tempting but I think I'll hold out until after the January sales as I am convinced retailers jack the prices up and then "mark them down" for the Sales.

 

I think my hdd are fat32 but I'll have to double check to be sure. I was going to remove the media anyway as there are lots of irrelevant pc stuff stored on there.

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when I used the cashback offer for my gen7, it only applied to certain retailers, so just make sure you check before you buy! I think most sales are starting now, but I tend to look for the refurb or open boxes stock that are Christmas returns. FYI ebuyer are offering the G1610T microserver for £165.24 after cashback.

I'm not sure how Xpenology uses FAT32 disks, but if you are starting fresh it may be a good idea to format the drives anyway. using the xpenology format (ext4 I think) you can build the software RAID and drive pools.

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The Gen8 at that price is probably the way to go in the long run the cpu socket leaves room for an upgrade if you need extra grunt. The USB3, SD Slot and extra NIC are worth having. The downside is the case doesn't have much free space for mods although there are some solutions for adding some extra 2.5 drives internally. Personally I prefer the case design of the older models, and I think that HP have gone in the wrong direction with this less flexible design. People in the enthusiast/soho market often want to have the most flexible kit with expansion options available.

 

It's a much better options if you want to use virtual machines and it's more future proof than the older machines.

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