By clicking my link www.piavpn.com/HardwareHaven you’ll get an 83% discount on Private Internet Access! That’s just $2.03 a month, AND you’ll also get 4 extra months completely for free!
I'm pretty impressed at how usable that little guy still is as a NAS. It's always fun to see new life brought to an old piece of equipment that many or even most would write off as dead and useless. Thank you!
Those Turion chips are a vibe and that NAS is a rocket. My SFF box is basically a total cut down of this at 1c/1t 2GB and works great with Windows Server 2016 Core. The performance at the console is a bit slow as it boots from a Sandisk USB but not insufferable. Does its job well with all the network traffic and disk requests. When you think in terms of the bare minimum for mission critical stuff but not modern day "lightning fast" you would be genuinely surprised by what it really takes to get stuff done. However I'm convinced that what I have is technically THE minimum before it becomes impossible.
I actually just retired mine a few weeks ago. Not because of any issues, but because I wanted something that could double as a router merging two device and using less power. But it's been running continuously for over a decade with no sign of stopping. It regularly reached well years of uptime before rebooting either because of major Debian updates or a power outage.
There’s a firmware hack enabling hot swap and other features. This was my first home nas. Replace original units with 4x10TB seagate and 250GB ssd for truenas. Adding a 2x10GB nic on it and 16GB ram
@@HardwareHaven You missed it, I have the same one. Do the firmware hack and it adds true hot swap and other features. Also there are many 3d printer models for drive caddies and such. I run Unraid on it.
it also lets you turn on full SATA speeds for the optical drive bay. you can put a boot drive up there and use the 4 for storage. I have 2 of these. one at each of my kids apartments running unraid with the optical bay housing an SSD for caching. Internal USB port works great for the unraid boot drive.
Mines been on everyday for 13 years. Only one of the front USB's work but it's an absolute unit. Hacked BIOS allows hotswap and 16GB, Mine is running Windows Server 2019 its a DC and a backup server (running ReFS). Its got 16GB of RAM, a 10GB NIC in the PCIe slot, a 256GB SSD in the lid and 4x8TB's in the bays. I freakin love it. Everyone comments on it when they see it and then they see how well it runs and they're gobsmacked
I've been running an older version of this server continuously since 2009 (I think). Just recently upgraded it with 16GB of ECC memory, four 8TB hard drives, and proxmox with truenas as a VM. Never had any trouble with it. Mine only has a 1.3GHz cpu.
I have the N54L, which has the same case, but different specs. This is a treasure and glad to have it in my collection. I ran VMware ESXi on it for almost a decade with 16GB low profile RAM for open media vault, a few web servers, a few clients, a TeamSpeak server and even a game server for a few friends. It managed the work well and I have always been happy with it. I am considering repurposing it as an additional TrueNAS server as it has been sitting unpowered for some time now.
Because of the sudden interest they spike the prices to cash in on the wave of interest. Give it 6 months and then check back in, prices should go back to normal by then.
I checked a couple weeks ago prices of Dell/HP/Lenovo Mini/Micro/Tiny small conputers and they were really expensive, around 150€ te cheapest ones, even for 8 years old ones. Maybe it's because in Europe areless for sale? It could be, but I think youtubers talking about them doesn't help
Ive had one of these since new - run with zero issues 24x7. Makes an awesome TrueNAS box exactly how you used it. Basically line speed transfers and super low power. Lots of mods including firmware hacks to enable more features. Can put more drives in the 5.25" bay and also boot from the internal USB slot to allow more drives in RAID/ZFS configs. Legendary little machine and probably the best money I spent on tech.
I still have one of these units as my home file server. Many years of continuous service and still running strong with a 10Gbe SFP+ card and currently running a stripped down installation of windows 10 and runs great with 72TB of storage available.
We have a bunch of these Microservers, just the N54L version, and they did sterling service as ZFS NASs, for years. My biggest criticism of the CPU was the lack of AES-NI, so we gave up trying to use one as our router. They haven't been used for a while, but I'm currently considering putting some dual NICs into them and resurrecting them as a Ceph array for our Proxmox cluster. Upgrading to the hot-swap BIOS is easy, and 3.5" to 2.5" adapters are both very cheap and easily 3d printable.
I had two of these at the time HP were giving a big cash back deal think it was £200 with £75 cash back. Couldn't say no to £125 mini server, ran Linux on them for video/music streaming and backup storage way before netflix and Spotify!
It was actually a lot less than that if you shopped around. I picked up a couple - one for £69 and the other for £81. You had to pick the right seller. Ridiculous prices for the quality of hardware at the time. Still have both today, although I haven't used them for a while. Just brought one back into use the other day and then this crops up in my feed.
I got it for €155 in 2012 (paid €275 then got a cheque in the post for €120) Told two friends as well. I was running sabnzbd, some early arr suite, running time machine backups, etc. Capable bit of kit, I still have it.
I have been using one of these 24/7 as my home server since I bought it new in 2011. It has been faultless in all that time. Worth noting is that it supports ECC memory which is nice for ZFS.
Back in mid 2023 I did a major upgrade in regards of storage and networking capability: - Added Dual GBit PCIe card - Added dual SAS HBA card - Added Quad-Tray 5,25" compartment - Added 16GB ECC Memory - Added 120GB SSD on the solitary SATA port - Retrofitted all four 3,5" adapters with 2,5" caddy - Added eight 600GB SAS drives - Installed TrueNAS CORE 13 This setup made my HP N36L a beefy storage monster hence its small size.
I had this exact model and I gave it away to a coworker. I never did install an optical drive, but I did install two dual-port NICs. It was a nice little workhorse.
Still rocking my N40L that I bought back in 2011. 💪 That machine was my main NAS running unRAID for almost 10 years. Today it’s one of my offsite backup servers. No problem running it with 2x4GB RAM. I’ve even seen people use 16GB, but that seems to be more of a hit-n-miss. At most I’ve been able to run it with 6x 3.5” HDDs and 2x 2.5” SATA SSDs. I got 4x HDDs in the normal bays and 2x HDDs in the 5.25” bay using a Nexus DoubleTwin adapter. Great adapter that unfortunately isn’t sold anymore, but can be found on eBay. Under the 5.25” bay there’s room to throw in 2x SSDs just resting in the space available. Jank solution, but with SSDs it’s never been a problem. I’ve run it with 18TB drives lately and it’s been flawless. All the extra drives are powered with good quality Molex 4-pin to SATA Power splitters. I’ve also installed two 30 mm fans in the 5.25” blanking plate. The backplane is only SATA2. Not really limiting for spinning rust but SSDs benefits from SATA3. So I have a PCIe 2.0x4 JMB585 5-port SATA card in the PCIe 2.0x16 slot. That connects with SATA3 to the HDDs in the 5.25” bay and the SSDs under. You’re correct in that HP had an extra IPMI card, not really worth it today though as it uses JAVA.. The slot still functions as a PCIe 2.0x1 slot so I have a card with some USB-A and a USB-C ports in there. Of course it’s limited to the x1 slots 500 MB/s but it’s still useful as all of the original USB ports on the N40L are USB 2.0 and slow. The motherboard has a USB slot that is perfect for booting unRAID or Alpine or some other distro that runs in RAM after boot. I run the modded BIOS that unlocks the SATA capabilities etc, you can still find it on Nathaniel Perez’ N40L site. It’s worth to do it if you plan to keep using it. I haven’t changed my fan as I’ve never been bothered with it, but it’s very much possible to add a better quality fan. Just make sure to change the pin-out as HP has their own “ideas”.. The PSU is normally what people have had to replace. Mine still running though. If it ever dies on me I’m planning on just adding a Pico PSU and an external power brick instead. Many have done that successfully as well. Should lower the power consumption as well. I’m only waking it up once a week for backups right now so power savings isn’t any priority. It’s not like it’s considered power hungry anyway.. 😅 This turned into a very long comment, but I really love my old Microserver. It’s what got me into homelabbing and I can’t believe how cheap it was to get such a quality product back then. They even had a cash-back coupon so I think I payed something like €150 for it in the end.
@@troelshansen6650 Oooooh after my comment I was looking for those, you cant find them where I am from unfortunately, I will stick with my pleb 4 bay setup :P
I've had one of these since shortly after it debuted. Aside from upgrading to 8 GB of ECC RAM at the time I bought it, I've done no other modifications and it's been rock-solidly running Ubuntu Server 24/7 for well over a decade now as my only server box. It's probably the most durable computer/electronic device I've ever owned in terms of its longevity. I've gone through at least 3 desktop PCs and 5 laptops in that time, while this thing just kept humming away in the corner. Mostly as just a NAS, but also running a handful of other server apps (Pi-Hole, Deluge, other things that have come and gone, and most recently Home Assistant). It also ran a Minecraft server way back in like 2012, which at that time ran flawlessly with about 5 concurrent users, so it's interesting to see how things have changed on that front. The only problem I've ever had with it was some fan noise, and that was because I REALLY neglected keeping it clean for a while. After a deep clean about a year ago, probably the longest period of time it's been powered off (like maybe 6 hours), everything was golden again. I'm in the process of building a new server now so I can get more into virtualization/LLMs, but even when that's done instead of going through the hassle of transferring infrequently used files from it to new drives I'll probably keep this machine setup as-is and just set it to the side as a sort of "cold storage" NAS that I'll only turn on as needed.
I got 3 of these Microservers, one NL40 and two NL54 that I just retired. They are still working though and you are right, they are great systems. To give you some figures, the NL54 (@2x 2.2GHz) with 5 harddrives runs at about 55W idle so these systems are showing their age in that respect. I do have an ipmi card in what was my main box out of the three. I also ran a 10Gbit card in one of them which was not a problem. The biggest weakness on these systems is the power supply. I have had to replace at least two that I remember (two of my Microservers ran 24/7). I ran Truenas on these, with 16GB of nonreg ECC's and it worked just fine. Not sure if the NL40 has this but my NL54's have a USB connector on the inside that you can boot from and therefore run 5 HDD's. Sad to see how banged up your unit was! Mine are all in great shape, with functioning keys!
I've got 4 of these running as I can't find anything else that fits so much functionality for the space. However you're right the power consumption is reaching upsetting levels
@@zakofrxdoesn’t it? That’s useful to know, one is the 54 and the other 3 are 35 so at least that isn’t pulling too much power. But it still adds up to a lot over a year
Serendipitous, I own the N54L and it’s been a real trooper. I’ve been using it exactly like this, purely as storage, since 2014. Looks like it might be developing motherboard and PSU issues but I might give it one last job before it goes to the recycling center in the sky. Thanks for the video.
i started my homelab journey on this. mine even had the remote access card, paid 110 euros for it, came with a 1TB drive that was full of bad sectors but still in warranty, so took it back to the shop and they "returned" me 70 euros. so the whole thing cost me 40 euros back in 2016. those where the good times when homelab was still fun, unlike like today when its 4 power hungry servers with hundreds of docker containers requiring constant monitoring.... the remote access card has no value anymore, the only thing it can do is remote desktop and power control, but requires outdated java version.
This is an awseome machine! I had this as my first NAS for almost 10yrs and had retired it few years ago. The main reason is the CPU performance and the lack of AES-NI. Aything touching encryption (sftp, rsync or disk encryption) will maxed out the CPU. But the chassic is so good that I'm still struggle to thrown it away LOL Wish there're some way to fit in a modern board and revive it.
Holey moley, someone local is selling one of these boxes for $30! I'm having that! I've been wanting to make an Automatic Ripping Machine, but not wanted to use up a SATA port. This seems like the perfect solution. From what I remember from when I was running a Phenom in my main PC, you could get so-called AMD RAM which was cheaper, but wouldn't work with Intel CPUs. Hopefully this is also the case with this Turion.
I ran one of those, the N54L version, as a local development web server and NAS for several years. It was finally replaced a few years ago when I was moving everything to SSDs and the PSU fan was getting noisy (I now use two Lenovo mini PCs for those jobs). They are great little file servers, quiet, reasonably energy efficient for the time, and ample performance for file sharing and other office server tasks compared to dedicated NAS units at the time. Very much as your video shows.
My N36L has been running since March 2011 almost constantly, I have only ever lost one drive in 2012, all drives are WD greens, I can certainly vouch for their longevity. Thanks for the Vid.
Set one of these up as a small office DC for a customer about 12 years ago. Great piece of kit! Recently picked up the successor to this (Gen8 MicroServer) to run my home NAS. Upgraded to the max supported CPU (Xeon 1265L) and slapped four 8TB drives in there. It’s a beast - can hardly believe it’s 10 years old!
I love things like this. Taking older hardware and finding ways to give it a new life. I think even if you're a speedy NAS enthusiast, this kind of thing makes a lot of sense to setup for at a relatives house to backup your primary NAS (of course you cut them in with some data)
the reason why for the 2 pcie slots in series is simple. the ipmi need some infos from the system some are not avalable over a pcie bus like voltages a video signal on startup and so on, that is why the second pcie x4 slot behind is used for. It is called the HP MicroServer Remote Access Card. it is like the idrac models for the older the power edge servers and other Dell servers as add on card.
The third IPMI slot was for an add-on card to allow HP's iLO remote management/KVM of the micro server. I've been hunting for one for a while (in the UK) but I've never seen any for sensible money and I never remember them being sold very often (i used to work for UK's largest importers of these little units).
I bought one of these back in 2018, that one came with a Turion II Neo N36L. I managed to install Synology DSM on it and used it as a NAS with 4x3TB drives in RAID 5 until 2022, when I switched to a Dell PowerEdge T320, which I still use.
I semi-accidentally stumbled over these microservers about ten years ago, and thought they were just adorable. The first N54L I got was used as a NAS running TrueNAS (called FreeNAS back then), with three drives in a RAID-Z1 setup, and was perfectly solid until I replaced it with a larger custom-built NAS. When my network gateway died soon after, I bought another N54L and threw pfSense on it. That machine still runs to this day, and handles gigabit fiber internet traffic without a problem. The Turion also (allegedly) handles ECC RAM, which makes TrueNAS very happy. They're small, quiet, cute, and a great little option for handling low-impact services.
I loved my one of these (I got it new 14-15 years ago and it’s still in a cupboard now) I used it as a Windows 7 based media centre/DVR, with a 4-tuner digital TV card recording from the UK Freeview signals. I also had a Blu-Ray drive/burner and a passive/silent graphic card, and pretty much used it as you spoke about, as a media centre that did no transcoding. I tried to boot it up again the other day but I was almost watching the bad segments on the system SSD (also using that spare sata port like in the video) spread in real-time, so I’ve parked it again and might resurrect it as a NAS at some point. But it was definitely a fun little project machine!
I would like to point out a small micro-error at 5:42. Those are actually mini-SAS to SAS connections. It's not completely wrong that you said SATA since SAS is just the big enterprise brother of SATA and SATA is compatible with SAS connectors (but not the other way around unfortunately) and I'm just picky with small errors like that lol 😆
Right before I got rid of mine I put a real SAS hba card in it and then put some real sas drives and confirmed that the drive bay cables worked fine at sas 2
@@Anvilshock Yeah, like when your dads condom had a small hole in it
3 місяці тому
Oh my God, I had one of these a long time ago! It was my first actual server! So nice to see it here :) Thanks for the trip down the memory lane! Great video!
I recently had to retire my n40L that I was using as a home server (primarily a media server). I got it about 10 years ago from the bins at a Goodwill Outlet stroe - it had the door ripped off and only two of the HDD frames. Windows was always "meh" on the system but running Ubuntu Server allowed me to run it as a web app server for the makerspace's robotics team and a VPN access to allow me to manage the other servers remotely. Sadly, the power supply died and it cost less to replace the server with the next generation than it did to replace the power supply. It was never a powerhouse but it was such a reliable computer that I hated to let it go.
Non-Hot Plug if i remember correctly refers to the fact, that you have to screw in the hard drive into the tray, and it doesn't come with HDD preinstalled. Actually hotswap if i remember worked just fine if the drives were not in onboard RAID, not sure about onboard RAID. In other words - blank HDD caddies are labeled "Non-Hot Plug" while caddies with HDD preinstalled have their capacities and speeds stated at same spot.
Nice video! I got a 10 year old HP Microserver Gen8 (Intel Xeon E3-1220L V2, 16 GB of RAM) for free, which serves me for over 2 years now. I put 3 HDDs and a Cache-SSD inside, got Unraid installed, which serves me as out home NAS including 10 Docker services (Jellyfin, Dokuwiki, FreshRSS, Kavita, PiHole,...) and it's running so super smooth, drawing about 22 watts in idle. Old, but perfect system for my needs. Only drawback is, as you also mentioned: No hardware transcoding, so streaming from Jellyfin uses around 50% of my CPU. But since i store most movies in 1080p, that's okay for now. I'm sometimes looking around what might replace it someday, if it ever fails...
My Microserver Gen8 has been running almost non-stop for last 7 years. Longest pause was this summer, when I took it down and replaced i3 with a Xeon cpu I bought almost one year earlier (they are dirt cheap now!) and replaced old 8TB drives with 4x 14TB. OS is on 2.5" SSD in place of the optical drive. Alongside is running a Minisforum mini PC for Plex transcoding.
I bought one of them when they were new, and were advertised to be silent. Of course it was not silent, it was noisy like a chainsaw, so I sent it to be serviced, and I got it back with the message: "yes, it is noisy" and no other change.
Still have mine running. Been running constantly as a NAS since I got it new. I have one of those 5.25" to 6×2.5" drive bays, and an additional disk controller. Incredible machine....
I had an N40L as my home file server until I upgraded to a similar sized SuperMicro system off Craigslist that used a mini-ITX. Was in service for probably a good 5-6 years from around 2015 to 2020 right before the pandemic kicked off iirc. Thing was definitely a beast. Probably could have used a cleaning like you did. If you pull the lock off, you should be able to pop off the retaining clip on the key pins inside and have a lock you can turn with pretty much anything that fits in the slot. Mine just uses an old key I found in my junk drawer that fit after some minor trimming.
I actually bougth the first version (N36L) brand new, and I still have it. It's been upgraded to 16GB ECC RAM, 4 x 8TB 3½" drives + 4 x 1,92TB 2½" drives connected to a HP Caching raid controller. Works well running Windows Hyper-V Core server.
I have two of these (actually the previous gen version N36L). Bought them new for embarrassingly cheap (less than what they sell for now used) back when they released. I’ve done all kinds of crazy stuff with them, from running macOS, macOS Server, OpenElec (Kodi), Windows, using them as OPNsense routers, Linux Desktop, Linux Server, testing out Proxmox, TrueNAS, and OpenMediaVault. Since then I’ve settled on both of them running as basic OpenMediaVault NAS boxes with 4 HDDs and a 5th for Parity in a SnapRAID array. The second one is basically an offsite clone of the first one. Fun fact I recently discovered is that the backplane actually accepts SAS HDDs. While the onboard controller itself doesn’t recognize the SAS drives, you can install a LSI HBA PCIe card in the x16 slot and plug the mini SAS cable from the backplane into that just fine. You can also add a cheap dual 1Gb Dell NIC into the x1 slot in front of that IPMI slot for more networking options. For example if you want to split data and management interfaces.
My first ever NAS. It was rock solid for a few years I had it and I still consider it as one of the most optimal and comprehensive home NAS platform (plus the modded BIOS opening extra functionality). Many modern NAS'es are still behind this cute gem.
I still have mine running as a Ubuntu Linux Server with SAMBA file-sharing and domain controller clone for my Windows clients, MP3 streaming server, SVN repository server for some code projects and webserver for a small home page and some web apps. I've got 3 SATA HDDs (no fancy RAID stuff) in it and they are definitely the bottleneck for file transfers as I usually only can transfer about 40-50 MB/sec over its gigabit network interface. I bought it in 2013. It still runs with barely any downtime. Best computer-related purchase I ever made.
Keep in mind this was not a NAS but instead was a true server... selling from distributors with Windows Server 2008 (OEM options). In my home network I still have one, running Win Svr 2008 and Plex as a File and Media Server. I should replace it (and I am looking at it) but this serves the purpose for the moment (and yes all my mission critical data is backed up elsewhere).
Just picked up a 10 year old Lenovo TS140 that I'm hoping to build into my first NAS. Love the repurposing of old equipment and the attention to things like power draw and compatibility.
I speak from 1st hand developer experience when I say: "Not supported" really only means "Not supported in the business sense, it might totally work, but our support won't do anything to get you (back) there." It really often is just a no one paid ius to deal with it, so we won't deal with it. But in case of things just being standard it might just work because all the components would support it. Also this might vary from hardware revision to hardware revision. And they just picked the lowest common denominator. Also common: They just never tested more, so they can't promise it will work.
I'm just getting started on my NAS journey and I seriously believe this is going to be it. Highly impressed with the power draw and storage capacity. Thanks 👍🏿
I've got one with a borg cube sticker case, but for upgrades you can use a pci-e x1 riser cards if you're ok about putting the card somewhere else. They also happily take HP raid cards like the P410i which means you can stick hotswap SAS Drives in, and with the hacked BIOS use the SATA port to run a ssd boot drive.
I was working in a DC when these started coming out and all the technicians lost their minds over them. Seemingly no home network was complete without one.
The HP microservers have been deep-rooted in the home lab community for a long time. Glad to see you doing a video on these as they still have some life left in them. The next generation ones are coming way down in price so if you need a little more horsepower its not a bad pickup for around 150 USD
It's the first server I've ever tinkered with in my life! It's a pretty cool little piece of hardware. I was in high school and doing an internship at the town hall (small French town, nothing fancy), and the IT guy gave me this server to play with! And that's how I started my homelab journey ^^.
I had one of these - actually the model down from it, the N36L. Mine had the AMD Athlon II Neo (dual core 1.3GHz) and when I bought it, it had 1GB of RAM. I upgraded that to 5GB total and I had 5 2TB 5900 RPM Samsung Drives. It was a great little machine. It acted as a simple storage server and some basic services. It was running Windows Home Server. I actually only just got rid of it as it would no longer POST.
I used the N54L version for over 8 year with Unraid, upgraded with 16gb of ram, 2.5gb nic, 2tb nvme expansion card for cache, 5*12tb hdd array. Wow! Incredible machine! i was able to run vm with Home Assistant and a lot of docker: deluge, jellyfin, sonarr, radarr, readarr, overseer, prowlar, speed test, pihole, unifi controller, nextcloud... Only this year i changed for a bit more powerfull system because started using immich and is taking days to elaborate photos and cpu is always 100% and with too high temp and power consuption
the other classification for this is HP Microserver G7 (Generation 7) The upper slot is for iLO card (integrated lights out adapter(HPE name for BMC adapter)), it is used for remote management and it can be pretty useful, if you are planning to use this machine without a monitor. This is just a plain PCIe slot with a bit different form factor, you can test it with an extender or something. I have the next one Gen8, which is much better with Intel CPU and also have builtin iLO and a single PCIe slot and is capable of running ESXi 6.5 with 5 or 6 VMs.
Absolutely love mine, had it 10 years and still use it as a NAS. Got the hot plug BIOS update, with an SSD drive for OS and 4x20 LCD display in the 5.25" bay. Also had a P410 RAID card in there at one time, for a cheap little server, it went like stink (at file transfer!) I found the CPU way too anaemic for transcoding though, even with 8GB of RAM.
I have a old laptop running turion, and last time I booted it up was 5 years ago to get some xp game save files out. This video may have just inspire me to dig it out of the basement and see what use I could make of it rather than just eating dust.
I added mini itx boards inside of it, you only need to cut the rear the square for the motherboard plate, also change the fans with a regular ones because hp fans had different connection.
I have a client at the moment running their business accounts on a HP Proliant ML10 G6 from 2008. I've been looking at HP Microserver Gen10 as a replacement for them, the little N54L Microserver has more than enough power but I'm a little nervous about trusting their stuff to a machine that old for reasons of commercial liability.
I've been running a HPE Microserver Gen10 Plus at home for several years and it's been great. That said, I also do IT professionally and I would NEVER use anything but brand-new hardware for a client's server. Keep in mind, for basic servers, the most expensive components will be the storage drives and Windows Server (if you aren't using Linux). Even if you use an old server, you'll still incur the expense of new drives and a Windows license, so you may as well add new server hardware as well. Pricing for HPE's latest microservers is much higher than the older models Windows Server pricing has substantially increased as well. That said, the expense of the server needs to be balanced against the value of the company's data. Is their data worth spending a few thousand dollars to safely store and serve it?
I still have 2 of them. Back in the day HP was doing rebate offers on them which made them ridiculously cheap. Only 1 is up and running right now running OpenMediaVault, it's just a dumb disk storage to go along with my main Synology NAS, but still runs like a trooper.
I had the same one, and it was much better than the laptop with two drives I had before. But after around 2 Years, I switched to a 19” Rack. I had TrueNas on an USB-Stick on the Board and used all 4 Drives for Storage/Backups.
I ran one of these as my home server for 12 years until January this year. I only paid £140 new after getting £100 cashback too. It was never very powerful but it did its job amazingly well.
Power Usage is one of the big things I've been looking at recently. My homelab draws ~205 watts at idle in total - that includes: 2 x PoE Access Points, a Ryzen 3700x main server with 2 HDDs, 3 SSDs, an NVMe and a 10Gbit NIC, an Intel NUC with an i7-8665 CPU, 32Gb RAM, an NVMe drive and a 2.5Gbit USB network, and an older system with an i5-6500, 32Gb RAM and a 2.5Gbit USB NIC. On the networking side, I have an 8 Port 10Gbit SFP+ switch, and an 8 port 2.5Gbit PoE switch with 10Gbit uplink. That's a hell of a lot of equipment in 205W. It can go ~10% lower if I change the UPS from always-online to interactive - but I just like the idea of having proper, regulated, clean power going to everything.
I bought one of these new in 2011, only retired it this year. Been running a ZFS raid on it for over a decade. Started on 2TB x 4 Drives, by the end they were 8tb x4. Still the same Zpool.
That's exactly the HP Microserver model I have. 5x5TB drives (one in the optical drive bay), ZFS array, so 18TB available, reliable as anything ten years later.
I managed to buy a very cheap one here in Brazil with a slightly better N53L processor. It arrived today from the post office along with your video. I already found the controller board for less than 10 dollars. I spent the day cleaning and thought about installing the OMV, but after watching your video, I think I saw that it supports 16GB, I'm going to go with Trunas. These models have a modified BIOS to release some features like Hot Swap and full speed on the SATA port. Congratulations on the content.
Had a HP N-40L ( I think) for a while and ran Windows home Server back in the day. Was a great little box. Gave it to a friend who's same server died ( can't remember how or why). Wish I kept it.
That does it. You've inspired me to try sticking more ram on the TrueNas Scale box I built on Sunday night. I don't have 16Gb of DDR3 Sodims hanging around - so this is motivation to order some (i know not exactly pushing the boat out, but buying stuff that may not even work - why bother?).
Back in the day HP in the UK did a cashback deal messaging them quite cheap, I ran Windows Home Server on it (both versions) as a headless plex server /nas back in the day, and finally windows 10 (I think), it stayed up 24/7 for about 8 years only needing a psu replacement. There was a bios hack that enabled the optical sata to be used for another hdd. The orignal version was a dog slow N36, I had the N40 like you and then finally updated the motherboard to the faster N54 by getting a spare motherboard for pennies off Ebay. I also ran a low profile gpu in the slot as well but I can't remember if that helped with decoding. Of course this was all before 4k was mainstream. The latter microservers in the uk were too expensive for home use (at least for me) so I went back to a self built system for its replacement.
This was my first nas with freenas 8 or 9. I upgraded and for the last 4 years it was my dads nas until xmas '23. I uogtafed him and now use the n54l as my nas for local backups before sending the backups to off site storage(b2).
I have one of these with a HP LTO4 drive in it. Great fun little tape machine. Works pretty much like the automatic ripping machine but in reverse. Download to the scratch disks, move to tape.
i allready liked the video because most other channels are talking about top notch prerelease hardware for "only" 800$ and then there is you, telling me that i could basicly take old used hardwareand still get a lot of use out of it!
I still have it and it is running 24/7 for more then 10 years with Ubuntu LTS. I'm using it to store videos, backups and last year for docker containers. I have upgraded with one SSD drive and nvme via pci express.
I've had one of these since they were still on the market, the slightly faster N54L version. Only within the past couple weeks have I finally moved the last services off it and turned it off. The latest set of HDDs have had 2 failed for the past 6+ months and the other 2 aren't in good shape. Earlier this year the PSU died (this will be a common issue given the age) and the form factor is very uncommon now and far more so with the number of required Molexes, but thankfully I had PSU in an EOL'd firewall that was suitable with a bunch of cursed SATA-to-Molex adapters. Other than the failed drives and the PSU hackery, its still pretty good system. The primary reason I replaced it was that 4 drive bays had been too limiting, and 1Gbe wasn't great either. The last time I refurbed it was around 8 years ago when I converted it from an DVR/NAS that hadn't had the DVR part touched in half a decade and turned it in to just a NAS with FreeNAS. I think FreeNAS/FreeBSD didn't support the onboard SATA controller, so I used the x16 slot for an HBA. With the extra 4 channels that provided, I replaced the ODD with a 4 2.5" HDD bay. 2 SSDs for boot and another 2 for cache. Nice to see that it seems Scale appears to support the onboard SATA. I put a put piece of dust filter material on the back of the door. This works really well at keeping it clean. Dust will visibly builds up on the front when it needs cleaning with a vacuum. I really wanted the IPMI card for it as back when it was a DVR, I often needed to access the console to fix things, but those cards were >$200 even in to like 2016. Ended up putting a USB 3.0 card in instead to connect external HDDs for backups and offloading old data. 2.5Gbe in the x1? I'm gonna keep that in mind if I reuse it again.
Had a NAS build around the Athlon II X2 235E which is the desktop sisterchip of the Turion II. Dataperformance on Softraid was great, worked 10 years without a major problem. One hitch with this generation of this AMD CPU/Chipset: The PCIE Bus for the Grafikkarts can't go into low Power Mode and is burning lot of Watts when something is connected.
![COMPLETELY Overhauling This Old HP Server [Part 1]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/2HLF-46Das4/mqdefault.jpg)
![COMPLETELY Overhauling This Old HP Server [Part 1]](/img/tr.png)
By clicking my link www.piavpn.com/HardwareHaven you’ll get an 83% discount on Private Internet Access! That’s just $2.03 a month, AND you’ll also get 4 extra months completely for free!
Getting 800mbps down and 400mbps up on Private Internet Access VPN with a 5gbps line.
I'm pretty impressed at how usable that little guy still is as a NAS. It's always fun to see new life brought to an old piece of equipment that many or even most would write off as dead and useless. Thank you!
Those Turion chips are a vibe and that NAS is a rocket. My SFF box is basically a total cut down of this at 1c/1t 2GB and works great with Windows Server 2016 Core. The performance at the console is a bit slow as it boots from a Sandisk USB but not insufferable. Does its job well with all the network traffic and disk requests. When you think in terms of the bare minimum for mission critical stuff but not modern day "lightning fast" you would be genuinely surprised by what it really takes to get stuff done. However I'm convinced that what I have is technically THE minimum before it becomes impossible.
And un-ironically - theright answer is ALWAYS Linux
I actually just retired mine a few weeks ago. Not because of any issues, but because I wanted something that could double as a router merging two device and using less power. But it's been running continuously for over a decade with no sign of stopping. It regularly reached well years of uptime before rebooting either because of major Debian updates or a power outage.
Ran Windows Home Server on one of these until WHS was discontinued. I've been running UnRaid on it flawlessly for years now. No issues.
@@foobar8894 Good luck witht hat, unless running a machine using vSphere or if you can find it and older copy of ESXi
There’s a firmware hack enabling hot swap and other features. This was my first home nas. Replace original units with 4x10TB seagate and 250GB ssd for truenas. Adding a 2x10GB nic on it and 16GB ram
I saw something along those lines but it seemed like it was for a different model. I might've just missed it! Might be worth looking into!
@@HardwareHaven You missed it, I have the same one. Do the firmware hack and it adds true hot swap and other features. Also there are many 3d printer models for drive caddies and such. I run Unraid on it.
@@stevedegeorge726Are there any motherboard tray models to put in a different motherboard?
it also lets you turn on full SATA speeds for the optical drive bay. you can put a boot drive up there and use the 4 for storage. I have 2 of these. one at each of my kids apartments running unraid with the optical bay housing an SSD for caching. Internal USB port works great for the unraid boot drive.
Can you share more info, where this hack can be found?
The HP microservers were legendary.
But since it was a good product HP had to get rid of them. They've got a reputation to keep up.
I was gonna say. This just looks SO well-engineered that I'm shocked it was an HP product.
They run and run while only sipping a tiny amount of power..
HPE continued the line, they're up to gen 10 v2
@@JustinDavis90 Gen11 is also out now.
@@lebleb8731 I really want to try out some DL20 systems for a little test microcluster at some point.
Mines been on everyday for 13 years. Only one of the front USB's work but it's an absolute unit. Hacked BIOS allows hotswap and 16GB, Mine is running Windows Server 2019 its a DC and a backup server (running ReFS). Its got 16GB of RAM, a 10GB NIC in the PCIe slot, a 256GB SSD in the lid and 4x8TB's in the bays. I freakin love it. Everyone comments on it when they see it and then they see how well it runs and they're gobsmacked
I've been running an older version of this server continuously since 2009 (I think). Just recently upgraded it with 16GB of ECC memory, four 8TB hard drives, and proxmox with truenas as a VM. Never had any trouble with it. Mine only has a 1.3GHz cpu.
Wow. I don't think I could handle that low speed CPU. Especially when I take energy to performance.
May I ask the exact name of the RAM you upgraded with please?
@@MatthewDaviesParker There's an actual fandom wiki for the N40L which has some memory compatibility info, you may find something there.
@@foobar8894 that's really helpful, thank you very much!
Did you upgrade the networking somehow too?
I have the N54L, which has the same case, but different specs. This is a treasure and glad to have it in my collection. I ran VMware ESXi on it for almost a decade with 16GB low profile RAM for open media vault, a few web servers, a few clients, a TeamSpeak server and even a game server for a few friends. It managed the work well and I have always been happy with it. I am considering repurposing it as an additional TrueNAS server as it has been sitting unpowered for some time now.
Same running XigmaNAS. One HDD needs replacing after several years.
Why do prices on eBay triple when a computer hardware content creator talks about finding an item at a very low price and mentions it on his channel?
I feel the same thing happens when a BBQ creator makes a video. How in the hell are oxtails that expensive now?
Because of the sudden interest they spike the prices to cash in on the wave of interest. Give it 6 months and then check back in, prices should go back to normal by then.
HP Microserver always were expensive even old ones, he just got luck.
I can't find one of these for under $300 now. Oh well, fun idea.
I checked a couple weeks ago prices of Dell/HP/Lenovo Mini/Micro/Tiny small conputers and they were really expensive, around 150€ te cheapest ones, even for 8 years old ones.
Maybe it's because in Europe areless for sale? It could be, but I think youtubers talking about them doesn't help
Ive had one of these since new - run with zero issues 24x7. Makes an awesome TrueNAS box exactly how you used it. Basically line speed transfers and super low power. Lots of mods including firmware hacks to enable more features. Can put more drives in the 5.25" bay and also boot from the internal USB slot to allow more drives in RAID/ZFS configs. Legendary little machine and probably the best money I spent on tech.
Is there a list of models that supports the firmware hack? Would love to have one as a backup-backup array
Did you upgrade the networking somehow?
@@AndrewHelgeCox No just using the built in networking
I still have one of these units as my home file server. Many years of continuous service and still running strong with a 10Gbe SFP+ card and currently running a stripped down installation of windows 10 and runs great with 72TB of storage available.
We have a bunch of these Microservers, just the N54L version, and they did sterling service as ZFS NASs, for years. My biggest criticism of the CPU was the lack of AES-NI, so we gave up trying to use one as our router.
They haven't been used for a while, but I'm currently considering putting some dual NICs into them and resurrecting them as a Ceph array for our Proxmox cluster.
Upgrading to the hot-swap BIOS is easy, and 3.5" to 2.5" adapters are both very cheap and easily 3d printable.
Ah, the good old Turion CPU. These were mobile chips primarily used in laptops.
They were alright as long as they weren't anywhere near a nvidia n-force chipset.
@@iiisaac1312 I've got a Horrible laptop in this configuration, broke down every now and then, the system became so hot that it de-solder it self.
@@iiisaac1312Tbf, I think the same can be said of many other AMD CPUs of that era, including desktop ones.
I still don't know why tho.
@@marioprawirosudiro7301 yep, I had barton athlon in collect, and this fit the description well. and yes, it has a n-force chipset.
I had a HP laptop with a turion. Thing was basically a space heater. It got replaced under warranty as it was system that had bad motherboards.
I really enjoy the way this channel goes!
Glad you enjoy it!
I had two of these at the time HP were giving a big cash back deal think it was £200 with £75 cash back. Couldn't say no to £125 mini server, ran Linux on them for video/music streaming and backup storage way before netflix and Spotify!
I am moving away from Netflix and Spotify and going back to self hosted.
@@thezfunk this is a good point!
It was actually a lot less than that if you shopped around. I picked up a couple - one for £69 and the other for £81. You had to pick the right seller. Ridiculous prices for the quality of hardware at the time. Still have both today, although I haven't used them for a while. Just brought one back into use the other day and then this crops up in my feed.
Got the same deal, what a bargain!
I got it for €155 in 2012 (paid €275 then got a cheque in the post for €120)
Told two friends as well.
I was running sabnzbd, some early arr suite, running time machine backups, etc. Capable bit of kit, I still have it.
This video just popped up when i recived my hdd for my hp microserver gen8 lol
NOICE
Just came back from the post with my HDDs as well, haha
May i ask what size of drive are putting in? I am wondering how much i can upgrade my old gen8
@@martinkominek6712 i have 2tb 1x, 1tb 1x, 2x 500gb
@@martinkominek6712 Never reached the limit in mine. When I replaced my Gen8, I was using 4x12TB disks without any problem.
I have been using one of these 24/7 as my home server since I bought it new in 2011. It has been faultless in all that time. Worth noting is that it supports ECC memory which is nice for ZFS.
Under-powered for de-duplication though.
I've been running one of these 12 years as a NAS. FreeNAS just worked, and still does.
Back in mid 2023 I did a major upgrade in regards of storage and networking capability:
- Added Dual GBit PCIe card
- Added dual SAS HBA card
- Added Quad-Tray 5,25" compartment
- Added 16GB ECC Memory
- Added 120GB SSD on the solitary SATA port
- Retrofitted all four 3,5" adapters with 2,5" caddy
- Added eight 600GB SAS drives
- Installed TrueNAS CORE 13
This setup made my HP N36L a beefy storage monster hence its small size.
@Bandicoot803 - I'd love to get more detail on what you did. I have this server at home sitting unused, and access to a bunch of SAS drives...
Why would you want 15k drives in a nas?
I had this exact model and I gave it away to a coworker. I never did install an optical drive, but I did install two dual-port NICs. It was a nice little workhorse.
Still rocking my N40L that I bought back in 2011. 💪 That machine was my main NAS running unRAID for almost 10 years. Today it’s one of my offsite backup servers.
No problem running it with 2x4GB RAM. I’ve even seen people use 16GB, but that seems to be more of a hit-n-miss.
At most I’ve been able to run it with 6x 3.5” HDDs and 2x 2.5” SATA SSDs. I got 4x HDDs in the normal bays and 2x HDDs in the 5.25” bay using a Nexus DoubleTwin adapter. Great adapter that unfortunately isn’t sold anymore, but can be found on eBay.
Under the 5.25” bay there’s room to throw in 2x SSDs just resting in the space available. Jank solution, but with SSDs it’s never been a problem.
I’ve run it with 18TB drives lately and it’s been flawless.
All the extra drives are powered with good quality Molex 4-pin to SATA Power splitters.
I’ve also installed two 30 mm fans in the 5.25” blanking plate.
The backplane is only SATA2. Not really limiting for spinning rust but SSDs benefits from SATA3. So I have a PCIe 2.0x4 JMB585 5-port SATA card in the PCIe 2.0x16 slot. That connects with SATA3 to the HDDs in the 5.25” bay and the SSDs under.
You’re correct in that HP had an extra IPMI card, not really worth it today though as it uses JAVA..
The slot still functions as a PCIe 2.0x1 slot so I have a card with some USB-A and a USB-C ports in there. Of course it’s limited to the x1 slots 500 MB/s but it’s still useful as all of the original USB ports on the N40L are USB 2.0 and slow.
The motherboard has a USB slot that is perfect for booting unRAID or Alpine or some other distro that runs in RAM after boot.
I run the modded BIOS that unlocks the SATA capabilities etc, you can still find it on Nathaniel Perez’ N40L site. It’s worth to do it if you plan to keep using it.
I haven’t changed my fan as I’ve never been bothered with it, but it’s very much possible to add a better quality fan. Just make sure to change the pin-out as HP has their own “ideas”..
The PSU is normally what people have had to replace. Mine still running though. If it ever dies on me I’m planning on just adding a Pico PSU and an external power brick instead. Many have done that successfully as well. Should lower the power consumption as well. I’m only waking it up once a week for backups right now so power savings isn’t any priority. It’s not like it’s considered power hungry anyway.. 😅
This turned into a very long comment, but I really love my old Microserver. It’s what got me into homelabbing and I can’t believe how cheap it was to get such a quality product back then. They even had a cash-back coupon so I think I payed something like €150 for it in the end.
XPEnology for awhile.
8 does meke a big difference, they just go in with no issues.
I have one with a CD caddy that holds 4 x SATA laptop drives, it is running my Truenas with an Adguard and Plex Server, runs great
You have the model of it?, my truenas server desperately needs one of those.
@@TanjiroNaofumi I got a Chieftec CMR-625 in mine. Its a 6 bay one, but fits perfectly
@@troelshansen6650 Oooooh after my comment I was looking for those, you cant find them where I am from unfortunately, I will stick with my pleb 4 bay setup :P
I've had one of these since shortly after it debuted. Aside from upgrading to 8 GB of ECC RAM at the time I bought it, I've done no other modifications and it's been rock-solidly running Ubuntu Server 24/7 for well over a decade now as my only server box. It's probably the most durable computer/electronic device I've ever owned in terms of its longevity. I've gone through at least 3 desktop PCs and 5 laptops in that time, while this thing just kept humming away in the corner. Mostly as just a NAS, but also running a handful of other server apps (Pi-Hole, Deluge, other things that have come and gone, and most recently Home Assistant). It also ran a Minecraft server way back in like 2012, which at that time ran flawlessly with about 5 concurrent users, so it's interesting to see how things have changed on that front.
The only problem I've ever had with it was some fan noise, and that was because I REALLY neglected keeping it clean for a while. After a deep clean about a year ago, probably the longest period of time it's been powered off (like maybe 6 hours), everything was golden again. I'm in the process of building a new server now so I can get more into virtualization/LLMs, but even when that's done instead of going through the hassle of transferring infrequently used files from it to new drives I'll probably keep this machine setup as-is and just set it to the side as a sort of "cold storage" NAS that I'll only turn on as needed.
I got 3 of these Microservers, one NL40 and two NL54 that I just retired. They are still working though and you are right, they are great systems. To give you some figures, the NL54 (@2x 2.2GHz) with 5 harddrives runs at about 55W idle so these systems are showing their age in that respect. I do have an ipmi card in what was my main box out of the three. I also ran a 10Gbit card in one of them which was not a problem. The biggest weakness on these systems is the power supply. I have had to replace at least two that I remember (two of my Microservers ran 24/7). I ran Truenas on these, with 16GB of nonreg ECC's and it worked just fine. Not sure if the NL40 has this but my NL54's have a USB connector on the inside that you can boot from and therefore run 5 HDD's. Sad to see how banged up your unit was! Mine are all in great shape, with functioning keys!
I've got 4 of these running as I can't find anything else that fits so much functionality for the space. However you're right the power consumption is reaching upsetting levels
@@justkomodothe 35 model didn't use much power..
@@zakofrxdoesn’t it? That’s useful to know, one is the 54 and the other 3 are 35 so at least that isn’t pulling too much power. But it still adds up to a lot over a year
Serendipitous, I own the N54L and it’s been a real trooper. I’ve been using it exactly like this, purely as storage, since 2014. Looks like it might be developing motherboard and PSU issues but I might give it one last job before it goes to the recycling center in the sky. Thanks for the video.
i started my homelab journey on this. mine even had the remote access card, paid 110 euros for it, came with a 1TB drive that was full of bad sectors but still in warranty, so took it back to the shop and they "returned" me 70 euros. so the whole thing cost me 40 euros back in 2016.
those where the good times when homelab was still fun, unlike like today when its 4 power hungry servers with hundreds of docker containers requiring constant monitoring....
the remote access card has no value anymore, the only thing it can do is remote desktop and power control, but requires outdated java version.
This is an awseome machine! I had this as my first NAS for almost 10yrs and had retired it few years ago.
The main reason is the CPU performance and the lack of AES-NI.
Aything touching encryption (sftp, rsync or disk encryption) will maxed out the CPU.
But the chassic is so good that I'm still struggle to thrown it away LOL
Wish there're some way to fit in a modern board and revive it.
This sturdy little fellow even digests ECC Dimms!
Holey moley, someone local is selling one of these boxes for $30! I'm having that! I've been wanting to make an Automatic Ripping Machine, but not wanted to use up a SATA port. This seems like the perfect solution.
From what I remember from when I was running a Phenom in my main PC, you could get so-called AMD RAM which was cheaper, but wouldn't work with Intel CPUs. Hopefully this is also the case with this Turion.
I ran one of those, the N54L version, as a local development web server and NAS for several years. It was finally replaced a few years ago when I was moving everything to SSDs and the PSU fan was getting noisy (I now use two Lenovo mini PCs for those jobs). They are great little file servers, quiet, reasonably energy efficient for the time, and ample performance for file sharing and other office server tasks compared to dedicated NAS units at the time. Very much as your video shows.
These were awesome units, I got one back when HP were giving cashback, it cost next to nothing to buy. Still works sweet today.
me too! Servers Direct I think mine was from!
My N36L has been running since March 2011 almost constantly, I have only ever lost one drive in 2012, all drives are WD greens, I can certainly vouch for their longevity. Thanks for the Vid.
i think the most annoying part of buying these mini servers is that sometimes they have broken or missing hard drive caddys and hp doesnt sell them.
Set one of these up as a small office DC for a customer about 12 years ago. Great piece of kit!
Recently picked up the successor to this (Gen8 MicroServer) to run my home NAS. Upgraded to the max supported CPU (Xeon 1265L) and slapped four 8TB drives in there. It’s a beast - can hardly believe it’s 10 years old!
I love things like this. Taking older hardware and finding ways to give it a new life.
I think even if you're a speedy NAS enthusiast, this kind of thing makes a lot of sense to setup for at a relatives house to backup your primary NAS (of course you cut them in with some data)
the reason why for the 2 pcie slots in series is simple. the ipmi need some infos from the system some are not avalable over a pcie bus like voltages a video signal on startup and so on, that is why the second pcie x4 slot behind is used for. It is called the HP MicroServer Remote Access Card. it is like the idrac models for the older the power edge servers and other Dell servers as add on card.
yeah i still have one. needs a very old Java version on your PC to run remote control or remote media mount
The third IPMI slot was for an add-on card to allow HP's iLO remote management/KVM of the micro server. I've been hunting for one for a while (in the UK) but I've never seen any for sensible money and I never remember them being sold very often (i used to work for UK's largest importers of these little units).
I bought one of these back in 2018, that one came with a Turion II Neo N36L. I managed to install Synology DSM on it and used it as a NAS with 4x3TB drives in RAID 5 until 2022, when I switched to a Dell PowerEdge T320, which I still use.
I'm glad you made this video, as I got 2 of these and was wondering what they can do nowadays
I semi-accidentally stumbled over these microservers about ten years ago, and thought they were just adorable. The first N54L I got was used as a NAS running TrueNAS (called FreeNAS back then), with three drives in a RAID-Z1 setup, and was perfectly solid until I replaced it with a larger custom-built NAS.
When my network gateway died soon after, I bought another N54L and threw pfSense on it. That machine still runs to this day, and handles gigabit fiber internet traffic without a problem.
The Turion also (allegedly) handles ECC RAM, which makes TrueNAS very happy.
They're small, quiet, cute, and a great little option for handling low-impact services.
At this rate, with how many projects he has, his router is hanging on for dear life.
I loved my one of these (I got it new 14-15 years ago and it’s still in a cupboard now) I used it as a Windows 7 based media centre/DVR, with a 4-tuner digital TV card recording from the UK Freeview signals. I also had a Blu-Ray drive/burner and a passive/silent graphic card, and pretty much used it as you spoke about, as a media centre that did no transcoding. I tried to boot it up again the other day but I was almost watching the bad segments on the system SSD (also using that spare sata port like in the video) spread in real-time, so I’ve parked it again and might resurrect it as a NAS at some point. But it was definitely a fun little project machine!
I would like to point out a small micro-error at 5:42. Those are actually mini-SAS to SAS connections. It's not completely wrong that you said SATA since SAS is just the big enterprise brother of SATA and SATA is compatible with SAS connectors (but not the other way around unfortunately) and I'm just picky with small errors like that lol 😆
🤔
so you can connect SATA drives to SAS connectors but not vice versa?
Right before I got rid of mine I put a real SAS hba card in it and then put some real sas drives and confirmed that the drive bay cables worked fine at sas 2
Are there "large micro-errors", too?
@@Anvilshock Yeah, like when your dads condom had a small hole in it
Oh my God, I had one of these a long time ago! It was my first actual server! So nice to see it here :) Thanks for the trip down the memory lane! Great video!
I bought one of those in 2012 if I remember well. It has never stopped working and still is. Pretty damn good little machine
If you remove the pins from the lock cylinder then it works just like a lock, but with anything being accepted (e.g. screwdriver).
I recently had to retire my n40L that I was using as a home server (primarily a media server). I got it about 10 years ago from the bins at a Goodwill Outlet stroe - it had the door ripped off and only two of the HDD frames. Windows was always "meh" on the system but running Ubuntu Server allowed me to run it as a web app server for the makerspace's robotics team and a VPN access to allow me to manage the other servers remotely. Sadly, the power supply died and it cost less to replace the server with the next generation than it did to replace the power supply. It was never a powerhouse but it was such a reliable computer that I hated to let it go.
I still use one of these as a home vnc server has been the tiniest workhorse and still keeps wanting more. Best little micro server for the price
Non-Hot Plug if i remember correctly refers to the fact, that you have to screw in the hard drive into the tray, and it doesn't come with HDD preinstalled. Actually hotswap if i remember worked just fine if the drives were not in onboard RAID, not sure about onboard RAID. In other words - blank HDD caddies are labeled "Non-Hot Plug" while caddies with HDD preinstalled have their capacities and speeds stated at same spot.
The onboard controller doesn't support hot-swap. If you use an HBA, then it will vary on the HBA.
I seem to recall you can enable hot swap but you need a custom bios flash for the HDD controller
Nice video! I got a 10 year old HP Microserver Gen8 (Intel Xeon E3-1220L V2, 16 GB of RAM) for free, which serves me for over 2 years now. I put 3 HDDs and a Cache-SSD inside, got Unraid installed, which serves me as out home NAS including 10 Docker services (Jellyfin, Dokuwiki, FreshRSS, Kavita, PiHole,...) and it's running so super smooth, drawing about 22 watts in idle. Old, but perfect system for my needs. Only drawback is, as you also mentioned: No hardware transcoding, so streaming from Jellyfin uses around 50% of my CPU. But since i store most movies in 1080p, that's okay for now.
I'm sometimes looking around what might replace it someday, if it ever fails...
My Microserver Gen8 has been running almost non-stop for last 7 years. Longest pause was this summer, when I took it down and replaced i3 with a Xeon cpu I bought almost one year earlier (they are dirt cheap now!) and replaced old 8TB drives with 4x 14TB. OS is on 2.5" SSD in place of the optical drive. Alongside is running a Minisforum mini PC for Plex transcoding.
I've still got one as my secondary backup target. It was stupidly cheap when new and has never had a single issue.
I bought one of them when they were new, and were advertised to be silent. Of course it was not silent, it was noisy like a chainsaw, so I sent it to be serviced, and I got it back with the message: "yes, it is noisy" and no other change.
Still have mine running. Been running constantly as a NAS since I got it new. I have one of those 5.25" to 6×2.5" drive bays, and an additional disk controller. Incredible machine....
I had an N40L as my home file server until I upgraded to a similar sized SuperMicro system off Craigslist that used a mini-ITX. Was in service for probably a good 5-6 years from around 2015 to 2020 right before the pandemic kicked off iirc.
Thing was definitely a beast. Probably could have used a cleaning like you did.
If you pull the lock off, you should be able to pop off the retaining clip on the key pins inside and have a lock you can turn with pretty much anything that fits in the slot. Mine just uses an old key I found in my junk drawer that fit after some minor trimming.
I actually bougth the first version (N36L) brand new, and I still have it. It's been upgraded to 16GB ECC RAM, 4 x 8TB 3½" drives + 4 x 1,92TB 2½" drives connected to a HP Caching raid controller. Works well running Windows Hyper-V Core server.
I have two of these (actually the previous gen version N36L). Bought them new for embarrassingly cheap (less than what they sell for now used) back when they released. I’ve done all kinds of crazy stuff with them, from running macOS, macOS Server, OpenElec (Kodi), Windows, using them as OPNsense routers, Linux Desktop, Linux Server, testing out Proxmox, TrueNAS, and OpenMediaVault. Since then I’ve settled on both of them running as basic OpenMediaVault NAS boxes with 4 HDDs and a 5th for Parity in a SnapRAID array. The second one is basically an offsite clone of the first one.
Fun fact I recently discovered is that the backplane actually accepts SAS HDDs. While the onboard controller itself doesn’t recognize the SAS drives, you can install a LSI HBA PCIe card in the x16 slot and plug the mini SAS cable from the backplane into that just fine. You can also add a cheap dual 1Gb Dell NIC into the x1 slot in front of that IPMI slot for more networking options. For example if you want to split data and management interfaces.
Boy, even just as a ~35w backup target it's really hard to argue with the value here. Super cool project and great video!
My first ever NAS. It was rock solid for a few years I had it and I still consider it as one of the most optimal and comprehensive home NAS platform (plus the modded BIOS opening extra functionality). Many modern NAS'es are still behind this cute gem.
Seems like a perfect platform to throw something like truenas on and plop at your parents' house for a remote backup
If you want the top spec (as silly as that sounds) you could keep an eye out for N54L.
I still have mine running as a Ubuntu Linux Server with SAMBA file-sharing and domain controller clone for my Windows clients, MP3 streaming server, SVN repository server for some code projects and webserver for a small home page and some web apps. I've got 3 SATA HDDs (no fancy RAID stuff) in it and they are definitely the bottleneck for file transfers as I usually only can transfer about 40-50 MB/sec over its gigabit network interface. I bought it in 2013. It still runs with barely any downtime. Best computer-related purchase I ever made.
Keep in mind this was not a NAS but instead was a true server... selling from distributors with Windows Server 2008 (OEM options).
In my home network I still have one, running Win Svr 2008 and Plex as a File and Media Server.
I should replace it (and I am looking at it) but this serves the purpose for the moment (and yes all my mission critical data is backed up elsewhere).
Just picked up a 10 year old Lenovo TS140 that I'm hoping to build into my first NAS. Love the repurposing of old equipment and the attention to things like power draw and compatibility.
I speak from 1st hand developer experience when I say: "Not supported" really only means "Not supported in the business sense, it might totally work, but our support won't do anything to get you (back) there." It really often is just a no one paid ius to deal with it, so we won't deal with it. But in case of things just being standard it might just work because all the components would support it. Also this might vary from hardware revision to hardware revision. And they just picked the lowest common denominator. Also common: They just never tested more, so they can't promise it will work.
Its successor, the Microserver Gen8 with it’s optional colored faceplates and managed switch is still pretty nice too in 2024 😀
And it could take a low end Xeon.
It's (it is) interesting how you managed to use its correctly then immediately forget how it works in the same sentence.
@@tim3172 La prochaine fois j’écrirai en Français (ma langue maternelle). Je ne ferai pas de fautes et tout le monde va me comprendre 😁
@@simoncaron7604 Wer sagt, dass korrekte Zeichensetzung nur Muttersprachlern vorbehalten ist?
I'm just getting started on my NAS journey and I seriously believe this is going to be it. Highly impressed with the power draw and storage capacity. Thanks 👍🏿
I've got one with a borg cube sticker case, but for upgrades you can use a pci-e x1 riser cards if you're ok about putting the card somewhere else.
They also happily take HP raid cards like the P410i which means you can stick hotswap SAS Drives in, and with the hacked BIOS use the SATA port to run a ssd boot drive.
I was working in a DC when these started coming out and all the technicians lost their minds over them. Seemingly no home network was complete without one.
The HP microservers have been deep-rooted in the home lab community for a long time. Glad to see you doing a video on these as they still have some life left in them. The next generation ones are coming way down in price so if you need a little more horsepower its not a bad pickup for around 150 USD
Currently using one of these as my main media and backup server. 38TB of storage, 8GB ram.
Its a mini beast.
It's the first server I've ever tinkered with in my life! It's a pretty cool little piece of hardware. I was in high school and doing an internship at the town hall (small French town, nothing fancy), and the IT guy gave me this server to play with! And that's how I started my homelab journey ^^.
I had one of these - actually the model down from it, the N36L. Mine had the AMD Athlon II Neo (dual core 1.3GHz) and when I bought it, it had 1GB of RAM. I upgraded that to 5GB total and I had 5 2TB 5900 RPM Samsung Drives. It was a great little machine. It acted as a simple storage server and some basic services. It was running Windows Home Server.
I actually only just got rid of it as it would no longer POST.
Your sponsor segment transitions are getting so good. I didn't even realize it was happening until I saw the graphics.
I used the N54L version for over 8 year with Unraid, upgraded with 16gb of ram, 2.5gb nic, 2tb nvme expansion card for cache, 5*12tb hdd array. Wow! Incredible machine! i was able to run vm with Home Assistant and a lot of docker: deluge, jellyfin, sonarr, radarr, readarr, overseer, prowlar, speed test, pihole, unifi controller, nextcloud... Only this year i changed for a bit more powerfull system because started using immich and is taking days to elaborate photos and cpu is always 100% and with too high temp and power consuption
the other classification for this is HP Microserver G7 (Generation 7) The upper slot is for iLO card (integrated lights out adapter(HPE name for BMC adapter)), it is used for remote management and it can be pretty useful, if you are planning to use this machine without a monitor. This is just a plain PCIe slot with a bit different form factor, you can test it with an extender or something.
I have the next one Gen8, which is much better with Intel CPU and also have builtin iLO and a single PCIe slot and is capable of running ESXi 6.5 with 5 or 6 VMs.
A couple of years ago bought 2 of those for 5 bucks each.. Ran home assistant a couple of months and then sold them for 50 bucks each :-)
Absolutely love mine, had it 10 years and still use it as a NAS. Got the hot plug BIOS update, with an SSD drive for OS and 4x20 LCD display in the 5.25" bay. Also had a P410 RAID card in there at one time, for a cheap little server, it went like stink (at file transfer!) I found the CPU way too anaemic for transcoding though, even with 8GB of RAM.
I still have this running Unraid, full AAR stack and an old Intel NUC running debian/docker/plex. Works great.
I have a old laptop running turion, and last time I booted it up was 5 years ago to get some xp game save files out. This video may have just inspire me to dig it out of the basement and see what use I could make of it rather than just eating dust.
I added mini itx boards inside of it, you only need to cut the rear the square for the motherboard plate, also change the fans with a regular ones because hp fans had different connection.
I have a client at the moment running their business accounts on a HP Proliant ML10 G6 from 2008. I've been looking at HP Microserver Gen10 as a replacement for them, the little N54L Microserver has more than enough power but I'm a little nervous about trusting their stuff to a machine that old for reasons of commercial liability.
I've been running a HPE Microserver Gen10 Plus at home for several years and it's been great. That said, I also do IT professionally and I would NEVER use anything but brand-new hardware for a client's server. Keep in mind, for basic servers, the most expensive components will be the storage drives and Windows Server (if you aren't using Linux). Even if you use an old server, you'll still incur the expense of new drives and a Windows license, so you may as well add new server hardware as well. Pricing for HPE's latest microservers is much higher than the older models Windows Server pricing has substantially increased as well. That said, the expense of the server needs to be balanced against the value of the company's data. Is their data worth spending a few thousand dollars to safely store and serve it?
I still have 2 of them. Back in the day HP was doing rebate offers on them which made them ridiculously cheap. Only 1 is up and running right now running OpenMediaVault, it's just a dumb disk storage to go along with my main Synology NAS, but still runs like a trooper.
I had the same one, and it was much better than the laptop with two drives I had before. But after around 2 Years, I switched to a 19” Rack.
I had TrueNas on an USB-Stick on the Board and used all 4 Drives for Storage/Backups.
I ran one of these as my home server for 12 years until January this year. I only paid £140 new after getting £100 cashback too. It was never very powerful but it did its job amazingly well.
Power Usage is one of the big things I've been looking at recently. My homelab draws ~205 watts at idle in total - that includes: 2 x PoE Access Points, a Ryzen 3700x main server with 2 HDDs, 3 SSDs, an NVMe and a 10Gbit NIC, an Intel NUC with an i7-8665 CPU, 32Gb RAM, an NVMe drive and a 2.5Gbit USB network, and an older system with an i5-6500, 32Gb RAM and a 2.5Gbit USB NIC. On the networking side, I have an 8 Port 10Gbit SFP+ switch, and an 8 port 2.5Gbit PoE switch with 10Gbit uplink.
That's a hell of a lot of equipment in 205W. It can go ~10% lower if I change the UPS from always-online to interactive - but I just like the idea of having proper, regulated, clean power going to everything.
I bought one of these new in 2011, only retired it this year. Been running a ZFS raid on it for over a decade. Started on 2TB x 4 Drives, by the end they were 8tb x4. Still the same Zpool.
You say you retired yours?? Why?
We both in SA... drop me a message
That's exactly the HP Microserver model I have. 5x5TB drives (one in the optical drive bay), ZFS array, so 18TB available, reliable as anything ten years later.
I managed to buy a very cheap one here in Brazil with a slightly better N53L processor. It arrived today from the post office along with your video. I already found the controller board for less than 10 dollars. I spent the day cleaning and thought about installing the OMV, but after watching your video, I think I saw that it supports 16GB, I'm going to go with Trunas. These models have a modified BIOS to release some features like Hot Swap and full speed on the SATA port. Congratulations on the content.
Had a HP N-40L ( I think) for a while and ran Windows home Server back in the day. Was a great little box.
Gave it to a friend who's same server died ( can't remember how or why). Wish I kept it.
Just refurbed mine, bought in 2010 with a 50% cashback deal. Absolute workhorse as a home server, now using it as a opnsense box
That does it. You've inspired me to try sticking more ram on the TrueNas Scale box I built on Sunday night. I don't have 16Gb of DDR3 Sodims hanging around - so this is motivation to order some (i know not exactly pushing the boat out, but buying stuff that may not even work - why bother?).
Ran WHS to 2011 for a number of years and then switched to Unraid. Finally retired it a few years ago.
WHS was actually not bad. So of course they killed it.
Back in the day HP in the UK did a cashback deal messaging them quite cheap, I ran Windows Home Server on it (both versions) as a headless plex server /nas back in the day, and finally windows 10 (I think), it stayed up 24/7 for about 8 years only needing a psu replacement.
There was a bios hack that enabled the optical sata to be used for another hdd. The orignal version was a dog slow N36, I had the N40 like you and then finally updated the motherboard to the faster N54 by getting a spare motherboard for pennies off Ebay. I also ran a low profile gpu in the slot as well but I can't remember if that helped with decoding. Of course this was all before 4k was mainstream. The latter microservers in the uk were too expensive for home use (at least for me) so I went back to a self built system for its replacement.
This was my first nas with freenas 8 or 9. I upgraded and for the last 4 years it was my dads nas until xmas '23. I uogtafed him and now use the n54l as my nas for local backups before sending the backups to off site storage(b2).
I have one of these with a HP LTO4 drive in it. Great fun little tape machine. Works pretty much like the automatic ripping machine but in reverse. Download to the scratch disks, move to tape.
i allready liked the video because most other channels are talking about top notch prerelease hardware for "only" 800$ and then there is you, telling me that i could basicly take old used hardwareand still get a lot of use out of it!
(like those superspeed 10G nas boards where can easly put 4x 16TB nvme drives für just 400$ each - wow what a waste)
I still have it and it is running 24/7 for more then 10 years with Ubuntu LTS. I'm using it to store videos, backups and last year for docker containers. I have upgraded with one SSD drive and nvme via pci express.
I've had one of these since they were still on the market, the slightly faster N54L version. Only within the past couple weeks have I finally moved the last services off it and turned it off. The latest set of HDDs have had 2 failed for the past 6+ months and the other 2 aren't in good shape. Earlier this year the PSU died (this will be a common issue given the age) and the form factor is very uncommon now and far more so with the number of required Molexes, but thankfully I had PSU in an EOL'd firewall that was suitable with a bunch of cursed SATA-to-Molex adapters.
Other than the failed drives and the PSU hackery, its still pretty good system. The primary reason I replaced it was that 4 drive bays had been too limiting, and 1Gbe wasn't great either.
The last time I refurbed it was around 8 years ago when I converted it from an DVR/NAS that hadn't had the DVR part touched in half a decade and turned it in to just a NAS with FreeNAS. I think FreeNAS/FreeBSD didn't support the onboard SATA controller, so I used the x16 slot for an HBA. With the extra 4 channels that provided, I replaced the ODD with a 4 2.5" HDD bay. 2 SSDs for boot and another 2 for cache. Nice to see that it seems Scale appears to support the onboard SATA.
I put a put piece of dust filter material on the back of the door. This works really well at keeping it clean. Dust will visibly builds up on the front when it needs cleaning with a vacuum.
I really wanted the IPMI card for it as back when it was a DVR, I often needed to access the console to fix things, but those cards were >$200 even in to like 2016. Ended up putting a USB 3.0 card in instead to connect external HDDs for backups and offloading old data.
2.5Gbe in the x1? I'm gonna keep that in mind if I reuse it again.
Hp did a killer offer where you could get them for about £100 new! I had a raid card in mine and it worked so well as a home server back in the day.
Had a NAS build around the Athlon II X2 235E which is the desktop sisterchip of the Turion II. Dataperformance on Softraid was great, worked 10 years without a major problem. One hitch with this generation of this AMD CPU/Chipset: The PCIE Bus for the Grafikkarts can't go into low Power Mode and is burning lot of Watts when something is connected.