I don't have any experience of WHS either (well bar installing v1 onto a pc to test and then never doing anything with it) so wouldn't mind knowing people's opinions on it as well.  You can get WHS 2011 for about £40 so it does seem like a bargain and might be worth it, but the lack of the Drive Extender is a shame but then I'll just create a RAID in it if I can.

Haven't looked into it too much but seen a couple of people saying that there's a custom BIOS to improve the speed of the onboard SATA that's meant for a CD Drive.  You can get it from here but no idea what its like, might try it tonight.

http://forum.wegotserved.com/index.php/topic/16427-whs-on-hp-proliant-microserver/page__st__120__p__104539#entry104539


I've also got a forum post on my PC at home with links to drivers for XP and 2003, which is rather useful since I've installed 2003 on mine, will post it up tonight

Finally getting round to setting up Windows on this (as soon as I have a USB keyboard) so I'm going to give this updated BIOS a try using the 250gb 'system' disk I've just mounted in the 5.25" bay. I'll report back when I've tried it. Just realised I need a USB pen so I'll have to borrow that off the missus...

Is it worth going the ECC memory route? Since I'm using this as a data server I'm wondering if (should I feel the need to upgrade) that its worth sticking to ECC memory?

I did a little reading on the ECC memory debate and from what I could work out modern (non-ECC) memory very rarely has issues and when it does its nearly always recoverable. ECC is also slightly slower and much more expensive.

I wacked 8Gb of the cheapest DDR3 in there i could find, more the merrier imo.

Useful links post:

HP Parts and Upgrades video guides

Tim's 7.24TB "Tiddler" Unraid NAS - includes BIOS mod/settings

Another BIOS mod guide if you already have the BIOS dated 01.17.2011 preinstalled from factory

HUKD thread (useful RAM info on pg.17 [60 posts] and beyond for OS/RAID configs)

Very cool: Massive Array of Inexpensive Servers (MAIS)

Right, I've now decided I'm going to forget Windows Server 2008 R2 and instead I'm going for an unRAID setup, this way I can maximise the disk usage and get 5/6 drives out of my microserver. For this endeavour  I have just ordered a trustworthy Corsair 4Gb FlashVoyager from Amazon (smallest I could get!) to get unRAID installed/booting from. I'll write up a full guide on this when I get around to setting it up next week. The added beauty of this approach vs WS2008 R2 is that data loss is minimised should the unRAID parity drive fail AND another drive goes kaput while it rebuilds (you can still access data on each drive individually, its not all tied to the array) and the other bonus is that I don't need £200 to invest in 2Tb drives, I can add them to the array as needed and as I can afford them without it having to be rebuilt from scratch.

It's about £40 for a Pro registration key that will support up to 6 drives in the array. In future there is talk of 2 parity drives being supported (as per RAID 6)

To be honest check hotUKdeals and google shopping.. will cover most options..

Been looking at raid solution and came up with unRAID and RAIDz using freeNAS. They aren't true raid as there is no striping, but I don't require striping. I just need the security of withstanding hardware failure.

unRAID looks very good for being able to add and remove storage whenever needed, however, if I stuffed the server from the beginning freeNAS would be perfect. Anyone tell me why RAIDz would not be a good option? It looks like a perfect solution.

RAIDz is still striped data. I've looked at all the other options and for me too the conclusion was that unRAID is definitely the best in terms of ease of management and expansion, the drives don't even have to match in capacity, so you can start with a smaller drive and expand. The only drawback is that the parity drive has to be equal or larger than the largest drive in the array. But other than that it hands down beats the regular RAID and RAIDz approaches. RAIDz has auto-error checking in NFS but unRAID can effectively be cron jobbed to do parity/disk checks, so this is made moot too. I'm going to get unRAID booted soon off my new pen drive and see what's what, although I won't be able to actually get it setup until I can afford a new HDD to put in it. I'm going to start on 3Tb and see how I go.

So, am I right in thinking unRAID would allow me to run 4 2tb drives with 1 parity drive? That would be converting the dvd slot into a hard drive slot. How does eSATA work? Is it picked up like a normal hard drive in the bios? That could give me a workable storage of 10tb, that would be more than enough for a long while I hope.

On the microserver you can effectively fit 5 storage drives plus a parity drive, assuming you pass through an eSATA to SATA cable, but without that then yes 4+parity including the 5.25" bay drive.