DON'T Underestimate This Cheap MicroServer

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Music (in order):
🎵 "CRENSHAW VIBES" - GARRISON
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Timestamps:
0:00 Why Did I Buy This?
2:02 Sponsor - Private Internet Access
3:18 System hardware overview
5:55 Teardown and Cleanup
6:56 Installing Debian and CPU Benchmarks
8:17 Power draw
9:15 Basic NAS
9:45 Docker, Home Assistant, Crafty
10:27 Jellyfin
11:17 Testing GPUs for transcoding
14:32 TrueNAS With RAM Upgrade
16:32 Final thoughts and conclusion

[porklaser]

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.

[stplegacy]

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

[TheQuickSilver]

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!

[neonteepee]

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

[chadreese]

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.

[kuhrd]

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.

[markbooth]

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.

[loadiam]

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.

[AndrewAlanDavidson]

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.

[lepompier]

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?

[Hatredkopter]

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

[davethetaswegian]

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.

[chris_hertford]

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!

[cdnron]

Ah, the good old Turion CPU. These were mobile chips primarily used in laptops.

[mlegos]

I really enjoy the way this channel goes!

[Bandicoot]

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.

[Cyber_Gas]

This video just popped up when i recived my hdd for my hp microserver gen8 lol

[fluxquantations]

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.

[johnroberts]

I've been running one of these 12 years as a NAS. FreeNAS just worked, and still does.

[Yiveytube]

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.