[MicroServer N36L/N40L/N54L - 6 Drive Edition]

You probably missed the word "little" but I'm glad we agree

[MicroServer N36L/N40L/N54L - 6 Drive Edition]

Have any of you tried installing ESXI on N40L and what the performance like? is it too much hassle?

 

I played with ESXi on N36L shortly but because (1) you can not passthrough a hardware controller to a VM and (2) CPU is incredibly weak for any practical application, it makes little sense to run ESXi on a microserver other than for testing and experimenting.

 

 

[MicroServer N36L/N40L/N54L - 6 Drive Edition]

I've installed today a new, more efficient PSU and taken some measurement on the new tower. Needless to say that I'm impressed! Best of all, the N36L board doesn't seem to suffer from high CPU load during writes to cashed user shares like the Atom boards seem to do. Although I don't have a spare SSD to test at full Gbit speeds, CPU load writing on cache drive (300G 7200rpm drive) alone at ~75-80MB/s was about 35-40% while writing to a cached user share added a small overhead of about 10% with room to spare. Bearing in mind this is a 1.3GHz CPU, I would say this is a great low power board for unRAID.

 

And for the stats:

 

N36L Microserver board with 4GB RAM

Supermicro MV8 Controller

4 x 12cm fans powered @ 7V

7 Drives - 4 x 2TB WD EARS, 2 x 1.5TB Samsung Green, 1 x 300G Hitachi

 

---Tagon, dual 12V rail @ 20amps / rail - 480W PSU

Power off - 7.5W

Boot Peak - 152W

Boot - 102W

Idle - all drives spun up - 92W

Idle - 1 drive spun up - 61W

Idle - all drives spun down - 56W

 

--- Antec Neo Eco - single rail @ 30amps / rail - 400W PSU

Power Off - 1.5W

Boot Peak - 122W

Boot - 82W

Idle - all drives spun up - 74W

Idle - 1 drive spun up - 52W

Idle - all drives spun down - 43W

[MicroServer N36L/N40L/N54L - 6 Drive Edition]

The decision come from reducing costs. I had a spare MicroServer left after a client upgraded to something more powerful and I have another 2 running in the loft with other tasks. Overall they are neat little machines and it was hard for me to take one apart.

 

Since my unRAID tower was due for an energy efficiency upgrade, my options were to either buy a new motherboard or put them inside a Microserver and upgrade to larger drives, both of which involved new hardware and more money which would have defeated the purpose.

 

The thing I love most about unRAID is the flexibility it offers and that it works with pretty much anything. Apart from the MV8 controller, some drives and a couple of fans, most of the stuff it runs is on recycled hardware.

 

Indeed, I wanted to preserve the components as much as possible. Apart from a 4mm whole into the mounting tray, everything is pretty much intact.

[MicroServer N36L/N40L/N54L - 6 Drive Edition]

I'm not sure if any of you did this already but today I've super-sized on my MicroServers into a full blown energy efficient 14-drive unRAID tower.

 

I've used the Microserver mainly as a backup for important stuff while the main Tower used an old Celeron board which idling at 180W wasn't very energy efficient at all. Having a surplus microserver, I've decided to take the mainboard and some internal from the MicroServer and upgrade the old tower.

 

The proprietary format of the mainboard made it a little difficult to fit but after some measuring I've decided to attach the the mainboard metal plate to the ATX tower and mount the mainboard into it's original and secure location.

 

To my surprise, this was not only an energy efficient upgrade, but a performance one as well. Writes on the new mainboard have risen up to 21MB/s from 16MB/s while the cache drive writes at over 65MB/s from about 50MB/s on the previous setup.

 

Mainboard is fully compatible with the Supermicro MV8 controller as you can see in the pictures, it runs with 9 Discs and has room for 5 more. Although you can use the HP mini SAS to 4 SATA cable, it was a bit difficult to manage the power connectors since they're joined with the data connector and terminated in molex connectors.  I've ordered a normal SAS to SATA splitter cable, hence only 1 of the on board SATA ports are now in use.

 

Migration was straight forward, I only had to reassign the drives and run a parity check. System idles now at 57W with 9 drives spun down, although the PSU is a bit dodgy (unknown brand) and sucks 8W when system is powered down!!?! Further 8W is taken by the MV8 controller alone while the 9 drives seem to drain about 9-10W when spun down. I run a variety of 2TB, 1.5TB, 1TB 5400 & 7200 drives.

 

The BIOS complained about missing the original 4-pin fan and kept shutting down the system so I installed and connected it as well.

 

I know is not as pretty as the original but when 6 drives won't cut it anymore, there is no need to invest in additional hardware, other than a new case.

 

 

Had to drill the old case and mount 3 mounting spacers

 

I used 2 of the existing whole on the plate and drilled a third one for stability

 

Mainboard sits comfortably and secure with 9 drives connected.

[Pimp Your Rig]

This is not good thermodynamics. Heat rises so drawinig air in from the top is fighting against the natural convection of heat rising. Your also likely to starve the interior of the case of air flow, which result in a rapid temperature increase. In order to cool a system you need good air flow, typically in from the bottom/front and out from the top/back.

 

You are right and maybe this is not the most efficient setup but if you look closely, in this particular case, the airflow is inverted as the air enters the top and is expelled to the front (hd cages), back(read fan) and bottom (through psu fan). Yes, the fans are working a bit extra to fight the raising current of warmer air but I would say there's plenty of them in the system and their combined airflow must be higher than the one generated by the thermodynamics in the case (keeping in mind that most of the heat is generated by the hard drives). My only concern is that there isn't much room around the case once fitted onto the rack, which could potentially overheat the system.

[Pimp Your Rig]

If the rear is blowing outward and the hard drive cages are blowing outward then there is no air flowing through the case. Would this be ok for like a 15 drive system? I guess if the CPU has a good fan it should be ok.

 

If that's the case, they both expel hot air out of the case which is always a good thing. Low pressure, cooler air can get into the case from the top.