* Pentium G5420 has 54W TDP. That's a lot. It'll be noisy under load. I'd prefer something like Celeron G4932E with 27W. I don't need performance, I need quiet operation and ECC support.
* iLO enablement kit is $100 and need physical delivery. No more $5 ebay key. That's a shame for home consumer.
Also I was not able to find a price. Hoping for the best. Buying Gen8 for $300 with cheap iLO key was a great purchase.
CPU seems to be not soldered, so may be it'll be possible to downgrade.
The specs on paper won't tell you the whole story. I've got the Pentium G5400 and even though it's rated at 58W TDP its actual power consumption and heat output is on the low end.
I don't have my notebook with me but I ran a small at home experiment with a kill-a-watt sort of device while monitoring temps.
Found consumption to be around 21W in idle, 26W for light loads, between 35W and 42W when doing heavy loads like compiling, transcoding, etc.
Temps are 28C in idle, up to 42-ish under load.
These CPUs lack Turbo Boost which is responsible for high temps in many instances.
I went down the rabbit hole of low TDP Xeon drives when I was last building a home FreeNAS box. It makes sense in theory to get a CPU that doesn't get as hot, so will need less cooling, but I think TDP is more about the total / max power used, not average. I would suggest a CPU with more cores it can keep sleeping for most of operation, but available when you need it.
The Xeon E3-1270's in my R210 II's are 80W TDP, the Xeon E5-2450L's I have loaded in my R320 and R420 are 70W - guess which makes more noise? The 2450L's, of course!
TDP is a guideline for cooling, it says nothing about noise, or even power draw. The former is a factor of the cooling system you have paired, the latter can be completely arbitrary as long as the chip can average itself out to the rated heat dissipation (which is what the TDP measures).
If you want a quiet home server, get a tower, my ThinkServer TD340 was hella quiet even with two Sandy Bridge-EN chips installed. Beyond that it doesn't really matter, hell, swap out the CPU cooler and case fans with Noctua ones to go the extra mile.
Street pricing in the US from lower margin HPE resellers for the performance E-2224 diskless model (P16006) has been discounted to $578-$660 depending on reseller/ day.
Still a lot more than some of the previous versions.
the UK price includes VAT@20% so you are looking for around
£524 (629), £699 (839), and £770 (922) respectively, which doesn't look terribly far off the US pricing given the standard UK markup.
The normal UK server resellers and disties (including the one I bought my gen8 microserver from) don't seem to have them listed yet.
Well the G4932E runs at exactly half the clock rate, so it's not surprising that it uses half the power. Just disable one of the two cores and now you have a 3.8GHz single core processor with a TDP of 27W:
echo 0 > /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu1/online
Alternatively you could reduce the clock speed to 1.9GHz for both cores:
cpufreq-set -f 1900
(need to load the userspace governor also)
And of course you can schedule this to happen at a particular time of day.
TDP is largely irrelevant. You are interested in either energy per task or power for availability, neither of which you can figure out from a datasheet. The latter is essentially the same as idle power, but depends on what services you run.
TDP is such a meaningless stat to criticize. People still caring about TDP is a huge pet peeve of mine. The TDP is a nearly entirely fictional number your modern CPU will never operate at.
Especially in a home server, the CPU will be maxed out 0.001% of its life, if that. The only stat that matters is idle power, which it will be at for the majority of its life.
Actually I'm going to put it into my closet along with the rest of "home equipment" (UPS, GPON modem, switch, landline phone). Noise will disturb me at night, as I'm sleeping not far enough from there. I managed to configure Gen 8 to be quiet enough with some weird tricks (it was not by default). Basically I need for fan noise to be on par with HDD noise.
I hated the noise that my N40L microserver made (even though it was super quiet already). Now I have a NUC, and plugged a USB powered fan [1] into it to blow air over the chassis (the small fans in the NUC are noisy as hell when it's under even moderate load). Now it's so quiet I can't hear it. For storage I got a USB3 based 5-drive chassis and hooked up my 4 drives running mirrored ZFS. USB3's 5Gbps is more than plenty for my usage.
Wish there was a non-insane costing 12 bay Thunderbolt array but because the market mostly consists of video professionals the math in cost and noise works out better to build a more traditional server anyway. 8+ drives won't be quiet. I've got my 8 drive array right behind me and the drives are the issue really.
I've been thinking about getting a microserver. I already have a Synology NAS but I'd like something a bit more powerful to host Nextclound and a couple apps.
The Gen8 Microservers seemed neat, but they are getting old and rarer on eBay. Gen10 seems like a step back performance and feature wise.
With ILO not available (or a $100 upgrade), what is the benefit for a home / small business / enthusiast user of a Microserver vs. a custom built system? I could probably build a Ryzen based PC with a better performance / price ratio, just minus the ILO, and it's probably going to be quieter. Any optinions on this?
The Microserver line is aimed at corporations who want to send out a local office server that they will maintain remotely; the local office might not have a rack or any other infrastructure besides a router-switch combo. Size is important. HP custom builds the case and the motherboard: repair is expected to take the form of swapping the whole box, possibly sliding the disks in and out.
If you don't care about size, you can do much better for cheaper, and be able to replace everything with standard parts if you have problems in the future.
For a powerful microserver, you might want to consider SuperMicro's E300-9D-8CN8TP. It's tiny, comes with an 8-core Xeon D, has an M.2 slot, 4 x 10GbE and is even ESXi certified.
So, what are these "couple apps"? You already have a decent storage solution. You might consider a RPi 4 with 4G RAM for NextCloud and some apps.
Other than that, I personally like the ASRock DeskMini A300. Slap an Athlon in it, and call it a day (keep in mind you need a "G"-Processor, with iGPU!).
At home, I've built a homeserver around a X470 and Ryzen 5 2600 - it runs everything using Unraid: Storage, Home-Assistant, PLEX, Node-RED, Grafana for the living room display, the secondary pi-hole instance, and also my personal Gaming VM. It runs at 15% load during idle, drawing 70 W (including Vega 56 GPU).
Same here. After Intel's decision to not release microcode updates for the Intel processors I was using (earlier core i7 models) - rendering them useless - I'm never buying Intel again.
I have an older Microserver (not sure which one), it had spare SATA ports and I put an SSD in one of them, slotted it in some free space and now have RAIDZ on all four disks.
Would be even better if they had the option of 8x 2.5" slots and NBase-T or 10Gbps Ethernet. The old Gen 10 was way too large, this one I could replace my Synology with it running FreeNAS.
"That optical bay was often used with an extra SSD. While the Gen10 had an extra fifth internal SATA port and a Molex power connector which could be used to add an extra SSD, the Gen10 plus does not have these features. We already gave the feedback to HPE’s product team and I think we have a solution that we will show in the full review we will publish for the MicroServer Gen10+."
Why do server hardware need to look cool? Do ppl buy hardware based on the looks!? So many metal cases with razer sharp corners to cut yourself on, making it weight a ton. And screws. And more compartments, like a Russian doll. Making it cost a ton. All you need is a wireframe made in wood or plastic, a bare board, and a fan.
> All you need is a wireframe made in wood or plastic
Wood burns, plastic melts. When you have a bunch of racks full of a bunch of servers undrler heavy load, managing the environmental temperature of the datacenter is very important.
Not sure datacenter is particularly relevant for this product, but yes, a homemade wooden chassis would be a bit of a car crash waiting to happen.
(Although the lackrack probably deserves a mention! :) https://wiki.eth0.nl/index.php/LackRack )
Speaking from experience, it is much, much, much more feasible to reach the burning point of wood or the melting point of plastic in a datacenter than the melting point of the metals used in server construction.
One of the jobs of the case is to contain a fire if it starts. A plastic case wouldn't do this, and a wood case would actively be hazardous.
Do you have a story? I've never experience more then 120°C in electronic equipment as it's usually the safety limit where it would shut itself off. Although in theory the silicon would still be fine at 300° where wood starts to burn.
1) Several appliance machines were in a cabinet with water-cooling doors attached. The doors restrict the airflow from the front of the cabinet to the back to the point where there isn't sufficient airflow to cart away the heat from the CPUs. The engineer responsible for those particular systems played show-and-tell with the melted plastic pins that formerly held the motherboard in-place for a month after the machines crashed.
2) An 8-year old rackmount machine had a power supply fail spectacularly and light the entire server on fire. Fire suppression was triggered in response. Several other adjacent machines were damaged but the fire stayed relatively contained to the one cabinet.
> All you need is a wireframe made in wood or plastic, a bare board, and a fan.
Yes, but no. Yes, that will work. No, that will very likely not be compliant with your local RFI regulations.
That being said there is little excuse for cases with non-deburred edges when you can get cases that are fully painted (in and out) and have most cut-outs folded over for surprisingly little money (~50 €, which really makes you question how any of the questions make a profit off of it, not to speak of workers involved).
1) Even water-cooled equipment uses forced air cooling to cool the water heat exchanger (unless you happen to own water rights to a river, in which case we have a different discussion). A lot of the highest mark-up goes to bespoke on-prem data centers (e.g. hospitals, labs) where the air isn't necessarily cleaned to spec. I would therefore think you want some stuff between the air and the CPU heat exchanger to force the air around some turns to knock some of the debris out of the air. So a grill makes sense.
2) Most buyers are buying single units, but most units are sold to buyers buying them in bulk, with a service contract.
3) If you're making a grill, it's gotta look like something.
4) You want something that approaches a consistent theme for your accessories: monitors, keyboards, mice, printers, etc. Even without the logos, you can match the HP mouse to the HP keyboard and HP server. Same for Dell, Lenovo, etc.
5) I find the big manufacturers try to slowly evolve their design over the years. You can walk into a place (hospital, power plant, ship, whatever) and quickly identify it as a Dell shop or an HP shop.
6) Electric discharge machining makes it relatively easy to go from CAD drawing to ready-for-production molds.
7) You need some low-risk projects for your young mechanical engineers.
8) At scale, your custom EDM-mold plastic grill may be cheaper than stock filters of sufficiently similar performance.
> 3) If you're making a grill, it's gotta look like something.
> 4) You want something that approaches a consistent theme for your accessories: monitors, keyboards, mice, printers, etc. Even without the logos, you can match the HP mouse to the HP keyboard and HP server. Same for Dell, Lenovo, etc.
> 5) I find the big manufacturers try to slowly evolve their design over the years. You can walk into a place (hospital, power plant, ship, whatever) and quickly identify it as a Dell shop or an HP shop.
This is one of the purposes of a Design Language -- it ensures users of your products can identify what does and doesn't go with your products. And it also ensures that if a user has used one of your products, the signifiers for your other products are immediately apparent to them.
Most interesting comparison for me will be the price. The Gen10 is so inexpensive that it's competing in the same price range as a four-bay Synology unit. But I imagine this won't be.
They all seem to be much more GPU-focused? i.e. completely different product segment?
And mostly (with a couple of exceptions) significantly larger than something named "MicroServer".
They are perfect for data crunching as well as GPU related purposes.
For IO: My 8 year old one lets me saturate SATA at 500megabyte per second. With SAS which it also supports it's supposedly 3000megabyte per second, bit I have never tried it.
For memory: ECC
For processing: Dual Xeon CPU config
For storage: Nice storage pods.
For admin: Out of band ILO like functionality, although I've never tried it
HPE will probably tell you that you need to use their drives. We have been putting in non-HPE hard drives so far without issue. More on that in the full test.
At least up until Gen8 you could use any drive; the bays came in standard dimensions and took my Western Digital drives without a problem. I don't see why that should have changed in the meantime.
To be fair, AMD also has that "integrated backdoor" for the sake of argument, called Platform Security Processor, sharing acronym with extremely popular game console just like Intel ME does with extremely often mentioned Input Method Editor(s).
It's x86, so if you count ME/PSP as a back door, then the answer is almost universally going to be yes. It would be like commenting on the new release of Ubuntu and asking if it was still using a Bourne-like shell by default.
* Pentium G5420 has 54W TDP. That's a lot. It'll be noisy under load. I'd prefer something like Celeron G4932E with 27W. I don't need performance, I need quiet operation and ECC support.
* iLO enablement kit is $100 and need physical delivery. No more $5 ebay key. That's a shame for home consumer.
Also I was not able to find a price. Hoping for the best. Buying Gen8 for $300 with cheap iLO key was a great purchase.
CPU seems to be not soldered, so may be it'll be possible to downgrade.