Thetownend.com

http://h10010.www1.hp.com/wwpc/me/en/sm/WF06a/15351-15351-4237916-4237917-4237917-4248009.html?dnr=1

Does anyone have any experience with these? I'm contemplating purchasing one to use as a NAS as well as to set it up to piss around with virtualisation for studies, aiming to get some certifications whilst I'm unemployed. I've considered buying one for a long time and they're available for about £275 from online retailers over here. I've got a couple of 500GB disks to use to start off with and will need to expand the RAM but otherwise it seems like a hell of a good deal.

They get good reviews. That's about all I know of them.

I've read so many reviews yet still feel a bit uncertain about it. I was kind of hoping someone on here would just tell me they own one, it's awesome, I should buy one.

You built your own NAS a while back didn't you Sam? What do you use, FreeNAS?

I've got one, use it as a lab machine running VMware - they're officially support for v4/5.

I paid about £140 for mine, at which price they're a bargain and I'd highly recommend them.

I wouldn't pay £275 for one though, there is better value for not much more than that.

HP are always running a £100 cashback promotion on these, I'd wait for that or get something else.

I'd wait until the £100 cashback deal was on, although whether it'd work outside of the UK I have no idea.

What version of VMware are you running on it?

Think the cashback deal is only ever offered in the UK, I know people in the US get pissed as they never got the offer.

I've run ESXi 4 and 5 on it, it's officially supported for both.

What are you planning to run on it? What certs are you going to be studying for?

For VMware it's great, maybe better routes to go down for Microsoft.

Shouldn't be a problem, can get it delivered to my parents and they can ship it on.

Planning on doing the server MCSA certs, not decided whether to go for the desktop MCSA as I've got enough experience in that. The idea would be to use the Microserver as a test machine for studying (set up a virtual environment, shouldn't need to ever run more than a DC and possibly a workstation simultaneously in VMware?) and will then use it as a NAS once I've moved.

Yeah I use FreeNAS. It does far more than I could ever need.

If you're going for the server certs I'd at least have a look at running under Hyper-V rather than VMware. Though getting experience in VMware isn't a bad thing and personally I find it a lot easier and better than Hyper-V (haven't played with Server 2012 much yet though).

Budget for adding some extra NIC's as well. I got a 4 port NIC for my HP box for about £60. Means you can set the networking up properly and play about with fallback (ie pulling cables out at random). I've only got 8Gb in my HP, think you can put 16Gb in them - for labs ram is more important than cpu.

If you go with VMware on the HP, I'd recommend installing it to a USB stick rather than the hard drive. If you do this, make sure the first time you boot it that all the hard drives are disconnected - otherwise it will install some stuff to a hard drive rather than everything go the USB stick.

Did some checking and a new model of the Micro Server came out recently (N54L) but there is still some stock of the previous model (N40L) out there and discounted - just under £170 here for example:

http://www.serversplus.com/servers/tower_servers/hp_tower_servers/658553-NCB

Bear in mind they don't come with a DVD drive (not that you need one, I cope fine without) and they only have 2Gb ram, for virtualisation you'll want to upgrade that to 8Gb. Think all the newer model has is a faster CPU which shouldn't make too much difference, you'll run out of ram before you run out of CPU.

Bump.

Thinking of investing in NAS, mainly as I'm fed up of buying multiple USB external HDD's and having to make backups. Looking to share files (photos, music) and not trying to do anything fancy.

I have no clue what's good, bad or indifferent. Something like this?

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Synology-DiskStation-Diskless-Desktop-Enclosure/dp/B005TOXMAW/ref=pd_rhf_ee_p_t_2_PFEA

Or am I better off going down a server route. Help and advice TEF please. TY.

Depends what you want.

The Synology boxes are good (I've got a four bay model), have lots of built in features and are simple to set up and use.

Going down the server route has its advantages and disadvantages. You can potentially do more with it, have more control and it could work out cheaper, but you have to do it all yourself.

If you're not a techie and I'm guessing you're not as you've asked the question, I'd stick with a Synology (or equivalent). If you do, make sure you only buy the hard drives that they list as compatible on their website.

I'm certainly not as competent as I'd like to be, nor do I really have the time (or patience) to faff about. I was hoping that somebody would say the Synology devices were sound. You've done that, thanks!

Can definitely recommend the Synology boxes.

Though as I said before, make sure you only use drives that are on their hardware compatibility list or you could run in to problems. Get the highest capacity drives that you can, it's amazing how quickly you start filling them up.

Even if you mirror them it's worth keeping your old drives to backup anything important and storing them elsewhere.

Just reading through this got me thinking. I have 2 or 3 old pcs in the loft plus an old laptop hard drive and a couple of Raspberry Pis. Does that mean I have enough components to make the equivalent of one of these Synology boxes?

The Pi's won't be powerful enough to run a full blown NAS solution, but one of the old PCs probably will.

Processor speed isn't all too essential, it's more about the amount of RAM and the number of drives the motherboard can take.

Pumbaa - There's one Ebay with 2 x 160GB hard drives for £100

Built myself an unraid server a few months back from a few bits and pieces I had lying around to store content for HTPC in the front room.  Works brilliantly and was completely free.  Have since upgraded the hard drives and bought a licence which has given me 12TB of storage with room to increase in the future.

Thinking about this a bit more now. What does the Synology one do that this doesn't?

http://www.ebuyer.com/248760-d-link-dns-320-sharecenter-pulse-2-bay-no-disks-nas-enclosure-dns-320

There's over £100 difference between the two, but what does that £100 buy you?

The Synology features are documented here;

http://www.synology.com/dsm/index.php?lang=uk

I think, as with Pumbaa, I'm not the most tech savvy in the world and was looking for someone to help cut through some of the tech-speak and jargon.

All I want to do is back up photos and music. Plus I thought it would be good for the family to be able to share documents across platforms - Also thought about creating a database or two to store on it. Was going to then link it into my modem/router and poss create a VPN for me and selected others to access - But that might be a pipe dream.

Never done owt like this before. Don't wanna spend oodles of cash if I can get away with £50 and a couple of old hard drives from no longer used pcs.

You get a lot more features and functionality with a Synology box over a basic NAS device. But you need to look at those extra features to see if they're something you want and whether they are worth the extra money. Have a look through the tabs on the page I posted the link to, including the packages.

Sharing documents is easy - it has a cloud file server (ie Dropbox style functionality).
Databases - it runs mySQL.
VPN - not sure you need it as there are other ways to access the files remotely.

Taking the plunge with a Synology DS213+ and 2 x 1TB Seagate Barracudas.

Was going to buy from WAE+ (who were the cheapest) but found lots of bad reviews. Guess it will have to be Amazon for an extra £25.

I'd go with the highest capacity drives you can, especially if you are going to mirror the drives.

1Tb won't last long.

And why the DS213+? You realise that is part of their business range? Will be overkill for home use - you're paying for performance that you don't really need.

Everything I have in the study is black - 212J would stand out like a sore thumb. Looked at 213, which was expensive. Once I'd made the decision, I then went with the quicker processor.

Processor speed means nothing on a NAS. You'll be limited by your network speed and to some extents the read/write speed of the drives.

Depends what you're doing with it. I have a 212j and I get full speed transfers out of it as long as i'm not doing anything else. If I run sabnzbd or sickbeard etc on there, the transfer speed drops to 20ish MB as the CPU can't keep up with the transfer requests, even if those programs are sat doing nothing. I've upgraded to a microserver and it's much better for that now. I still wanted a couple of synology features though so i'm running their software in a VM so get the best of both worlds.

HP Micro Server down to £110 at eBuyer after the £100 cashback....

http://www.ebuyer.com/430446-proliant-microserver-turion-2-2-2gb-250gb-nhpl-sata-lff-in-704941-421