good video brad im actually looking at upgrading gen 8 hp microserver and im thinking a network card could increase its speed with it being hardware over software Am i right in that you cannot install newer network cards into a system that has not been mentioned by the manufacturer Can you explain what the advantages are of the onboard memory caching as some have none some have over a gigabyte would this just reduce stress on the card ?
No you can can add a newer network (Like a 10 GB NIC) to a older server if you have a slot for it and the on board NIC-NTU cache adds a lot to the bandwidth needs you are looking for. Go for it but do you research. Avoid the old NIC for use unless you want to setup a slower remote management network along side the higher speed front end network or you can go three tier network, management/front end/ and your nightly backups network. split up all your bandwidth over three NICs so your fastest is never slowed down by overhead work like back up... As for the caching role that the motherboard BIOS, your operating system vs. your higher level NIC local cache all work together. The NIC settings are set to default mode so your NTU / NPU caching may be set more on the OS level / side. Research your NIC drivers and then go in and adjust the settings so the NIC take most of the NTU role on itself and that remove overhead from the motherboard and the OS. And! it is faster as well. You just have to play with it some and learn from it. It takes time but that is the point right!?! lol
@@leadiususa7394 Hi brad thanks for the reply i think its possible but the limitation is the pci slot is 2.0 x 16 low profile so i think i can do 10 GB nic but not any faster so its ok as a file server, or cloud server it is possible to have it as a media server as well but then you cant upgrade the to a 10Gb nic So ill have to have a separate Media server
@@leadiususa7394 As to what you were saying about connecting more cards to your SSD hard drives do you have a limitation on the amount of pci slots you have available on your server What technoloty is it 2.0 3.0 ? or does the age of the technology give any bottleneck issues ?
Just because the manufacture hasn't tested a NIC on it chassis doesn't mean it will not work. Almost all NICs have the same standard so unless it is a really odd NIC, it most likely will work. As for the on board caching, you have that backwards. If the NIC NTU take up the workload instead of the on board CPU /caching, you take the workload off the CPU freeing it up for more important tasks plus you remove two I/O wait states from the handling process that slow things down. You see if the CPU has to do all the work and the NIC just handles what is given to it, then the CPU is not moving at its best speed. Allow the NTU of the NIC to take over that role than the CPU if freed up and it uses it caching more functionally with the core data it must handle. That is how you can improve the caching effect. Hope this helps some.
@@1111000ANGEL0001111 Great question, if you have PCIe 2.0 slots or better you are good and I would say maybe spread the SSD drives (Let us say 75) over three controllers 25 drive each. The bottleneck here is the controller itself due to limit amounts of on board caching resources. Lower the amount of disks on each controller will allow you to avoid you reaching memory those limits. One other things to do is use a true NAS OS like True NAS instead of Linux or Miscrosoft server. The software is free to use (with some limits on it) but will allow you to use the motherboard RAM as a form NAS storage caching. This works great if you have like 64 to 128 GB to work with. With that and the three controllers, you will have a fast NAS. One last thing. On the NIC side of things, do you research on the max settings you can setup for your network. The default settings are just that. Default. You can do better. Hope this helps some...
oh by the way brad what ssd are you using are they 256mb ssd or 512mb ssd or bigger ? and the hp microserver G8 i want to upgrade are spinning disks so im guessing you could swap these out for SSD's but let me look at the manual images10.newegg.com/User-Manual/User_Manual_59-108-088.pdf now reading this it says the controller or the motherboard decides whether its hot swappable but these micro systems from factory are not hot swappable but if i put on this modification of a internal network card and i upgrade the hdd to ssd would this make them hot swappable or will the motherboard still limit them to not being none hot swappable or will it be a case of trying it and it will either work or it wont ? thanks for the help :)
I would work with 1 TB drives if possible for you are limited on space most of the time. But 512 GB SSD works just as well if cost is a factor. Anything less is not really of value. Also do RAID 1 if possible for best results, RAID 5 if you just need a lot of space to work with but you need at least three drives for RAID 5 and four if RAID 6.
The SSD drives I use are Team Group. They work well for my needs. Here is the link. secure.newegg.com/orders/list?RandomID=76153152117862920220830072954
As for testing a SSD on your chassis, I would do this first. get one or two drives for your testing needs. Install them and make sure if you need to have adapter kit to mount the disk may be need if the screw holes are not present. If not you can just drill the four holes in with a drill later. (I think your drive caddies have the holes to mount a 2.5 inch SSD drive.) Test the system with the drives that they can be seen and use by the BIOS of the motherboard controller. As for the hot swap mode, that can be address by adding hot swap disk to the mix. That would be two drives in RAID 1 and one drive acting as a swap drive if one of the other fail for any reason. This will cover your needs. You are not in a production environment so having hot swappable drive is not really needed. If you want the add protection just add the third drive as your backup drive for fail over. Hope this helps!
@@leadiususa7394 yes well because you mentioned that the onboard controller is slower unless you use an internal front end network card you probablly couldnt gain a speed advantage and im not sure that if you did get the 10g that that would pass through the main board and out the back at 10gb or not ?
This is true. This is what we've discovered with the Nimble AF40 arrays. The controllers would bottleneck before the SSDs reach capacity.
good video brad im actually looking at upgrading gen 8 hp microserver and im thinking a network card could increase its speed with it being hardware over software
Am i right in that you cannot install newer network cards into a system that has not been mentioned by the manufacturer
Can you explain what the advantages are of the onboard memory caching as some have none some have over a gigabyte would this just reduce stress on the card ?
No you can can add a newer network (Like a 10 GB NIC) to a older server if you have a slot for it and the on board NIC-NTU cache adds a lot to the bandwidth needs you are looking for. Go for it but do you research. Avoid the old NIC for use unless you want to setup a slower remote management network along side the higher speed front end network or you can go three tier network, management/front end/ and your nightly backups network. split up all your bandwidth over three NICs so your fastest is never slowed down by overhead work like back up... As for the caching role that the motherboard BIOS, your operating system vs. your higher level NIC local cache all work together. The NIC settings are set to default mode so your NTU / NPU caching may be set more on the OS level / side. Research your NIC drivers and then go in and adjust the settings so the NIC take most of the NTU role on itself and that remove overhead from the motherboard and the OS. And! it is faster as well. You just have to play with it some and learn from it. It takes time but that is the point right!?! lol
@@leadiususa7394 Hi brad thanks for the reply i think its possible but the limitation is the pci slot is 2.0 x 16 low profile
so i think i can do 10 GB nic but not any faster
so its ok as a file server, or cloud server
it is possible to have it as a media server as well but then you cant upgrade the to a 10Gb nic
So ill have to have a separate Media server
@@leadiususa7394 As to what you were saying about connecting more cards to your SSD hard drives do you have a limitation on the amount of pci slots you have available on your server
What technoloty is it 2.0 3.0 ?
or does the age of the technology give any bottleneck issues ?
Just because the manufacture hasn't tested a NIC on it chassis doesn't mean it will not work. Almost all NICs have the same standard so unless it is a really odd NIC, it most likely will work. As for the on board caching, you have that backwards. If the NIC NTU take up the workload instead of the on board CPU /caching, you take the workload off the CPU freeing it up for more important tasks plus you remove two I/O wait states from the handling process that slow things down. You see if the CPU has to do all the work and the NIC just handles what is given to it, then the CPU is not moving at its best speed. Allow the NTU of the NIC to take over that role than the CPU if freed up and it uses it caching more functionally with the core data it must handle. That is how you can improve the caching effect. Hope this helps some.
@@1111000ANGEL0001111 Great question, if you have PCIe 2.0 slots or better you are good and I would say maybe spread the SSD drives (Let us say 75) over three controllers 25 drive each. The bottleneck here is the controller itself due to limit amounts of on board caching resources. Lower the amount of disks on each controller will allow you to avoid you reaching memory those limits. One other things to do is use a true NAS OS like True NAS instead of Linux or Miscrosoft server. The software is free to use (with some limits on it) but will allow you to use the motherboard RAM as a form NAS storage caching. This works great if you have like 64 to 128 GB to work with. With that and the three controllers, you will have a fast NAS. One last thing. On the NIC side of things, do you research on the max settings you can setup for your network. The default settings are just that. Default. You can do better. Hope this helps some...
oh by the way brad what ssd are you using are they 256mb ssd or 512mb ssd or bigger ?
and the hp microserver G8 i want to upgrade are spinning disks so im guessing you could swap these out for SSD's but let me look at the manual
images10.newegg.com/User-Manual/User_Manual_59-108-088.pdf
now reading this it says the controller or the motherboard decides whether its hot swappable but these micro systems from factory are not hot swappable but if i put on this modification of a internal network card and i upgrade the hdd to ssd would this make them hot swappable or will the motherboard still limit them to not being none hot swappable or will it be a case of trying it and it will either work or it wont ?
thanks for the help :)
I would work with 1 TB drives if possible for you are limited on space most of the time. But 512 GB SSD works just as well if cost is a factor. Anything less is not really of value. Also do RAID 1 if possible for best results, RAID 5 if you just need a lot of space to work with but you need at least three drives for RAID 5 and four if RAID 6.
The SSD drives I use are Team Group. They work well for my needs. Here is the link. secure.newegg.com/orders/list?RandomID=76153152117862920220830072954
As for testing a SSD on your chassis, I would do this first. get one or two drives for your testing needs. Install them and make sure if you need to have adapter kit to mount the disk may be need if the screw holes are not present. If not you can just drill the four holes in with a drill later. (I think your drive caddies have the holes to mount a 2.5 inch SSD drive.) Test the system with the drives that they can be seen and use by the BIOS of the motherboard controller. As for the hot swap mode, that can be address by adding hot swap disk to the mix. That would be two drives in RAID 1 and one drive acting as a swap drive if one of the other fail for any reason. This will cover your needs. You are not in a production environment so having hot swappable drive is not really needed. If you want the add protection just add the third drive as your backup drive for fail over. Hope this helps!
@@leadiususa7394 what are the differences between the teamp group cx2 drives and the gx2 ?
@@leadiususa7394 yes well because you mentioned that the onboard controller is slower unless you use an internal front end network card you probablly couldnt gain a speed advantage and im not sure that if you did get the 10g that that would pass through the main board and out the back at 10gb or not ?