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Comment by vbezhenar | Hacker News Reader

I own HP Microserver Gen8. It allows to use 4 disks, it's a real server (ECC memory, hardware watchdog, KVM over network and much more), it's extremely quiet and it costs $200 with Celeron processor. Also it's quite outdated at this moment and requires using "hardware raid" (implemented in software proprietary driver) for optimal cooling, it's awesome machine and I didn't found anything better yet. I only wish HP would continue this line.

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I have a previous generation N40L and highly recommend this line of products for people who can get away with 4 or fewer disks. It's well-designed and a solid product. The loudest component is the HDDs, followed by a case fan that occasionally acts up. The CPU is pretty slow at this point but I only ask it to do RAID10, not RAID5 or ZFS.

I'm still using one of the previous generation HP N54Ls. Great pieces of kit. The Gen8 was a slight step backwards in some ways insofar as loosing the standard 5.25" bay which was handy for installing 4-6 2.5" drives. Agree that HP should definitely keep evolving this, but seems like they aren't interested. Plus they have taken an actively hobbyist-unfriendly stance with regard to access to updated drivers now requiring a support agreement.

Why does it require using hardware raid for optimal cooling? I set up one of these recently using AHCI (disabling the hardware raid controller) with mdadm.

When you're using hardware raid, server is able to read HDD temperatures and adjusts fans accordingly. When you're using AHCI, server can't read HDD sensors and turns fans higher. I'm not sure why it's implemented this way, but you can easily check it via iLo web interface. For me it's 20% fan vs 6% fan and I can distinguish it, I can hear 20% fan at silent night, but 6% fan is really silent, so my wife can sleep well.

If you don't have those problems with noise, it doesn't matter (and I would recommend to avoid those "hardware" raids, I have much more trust with widely used open source solutions).

you can always upgrade the cpu if you find the performance lagging.

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