April 17, 201115 yr I was in the market for a 4 bay raid device to support my media room’s HDI Dune H1 via my home network. While doing some research I came across unRaid and once I realized it was more than just a bunch of drives and involved learning something new I was hooked. I love to tinker. I didn’t want to place the server in my media room cabinet cause it’s hard enough to keep that cooled even when the AC is running so it had to be small in order to sit on my desk in the family room. I came across neilt0 MicroServer build (Thank you for the inspiration) and minutes later the confirmation email was in my inbox from Newegg =) OS at time of building: unRAID 4.7 Plus CPU: AMD Athlon™ II NEO N36L (1.3GHz Dual Core, 12W TDP) Motherboard: Proprietary HP RAM: 4GB Kingston 240-pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered 1333 Case: HP Drive Cage(s): 4x Cold Swap Power Supply: 200W SATA Expansion Card(s): Future upgrade Cables: 6 foot ESATA to SATA cable to support the 6th drive Fans: 1x 120mm fan for whole chassis + 1x 40mm PSU fan Parity Drive: 2TB Hitachi HDS5C3020ALA632 Data Drives: 2TB WD20EARS, 2TB Hitachi HDS5C3020ALA632 , 2TB Samsung HD203UI, 1.5TB ST31500341AS Cache Drive: 500GB WD WD5000BPKT 7200 rpm Total Drive Capacity: 7.5 TB Primary Use: Movie, Music, File Storage Likes: Meets the wife acceptance factor and still provides me with plenty of storage and speed to meet my media needs. Dislikes: The case top is a pain to put back in place once removed but that’s not very often. Several cables had to be removed to slide the motherboard tray out to replace the memory but what do you expect when it’s such a tiny case. Add Ons Used: unMenu and a few support packages. Future Plans: I ordered a 2 port PCIe SATA card to support one more drive. Tinker time!!! I would like to see if it’s possible to remove the cage and replace with a 5 drive. Power Requirements: I don’t have a Kill A Watt Meter on purpose as the thought of what my media room components draw frightens me. I consider this another part of the room and another thing to feed my obsessive compulsive behavior.
April 17, 201115 yr Congrats those microservers are becoming more and more popular every day I sware.
April 17, 201115 yr RAM: 4GB Kingston 240-pin DDR3 SDRAM ECC Unbuffered 1333 Dislikes: The case top is a pain to put back in place once removed but that’s not very often. Tinker time!!! I would like to see if it’s possible to remove the cage and replace with a 5 drive. Long live Server Jr.! Did you try the 1GB DIMM + the 4GB DIMM? You should have 5GB total? The top is easy to replace if you open the door fully first. Did you try loading up drives in the 5.25" bay? After your previous post, I now have 2x 3.5" drives in there. They don't get too hot, but I haven't tried a parity check yet. I even have a 2.5" drive on a USB port (also internal). I think I could squeeze 9x 3.5" drives and 2 or 3 2.5" drives in to the case, although I think I'll probably keep with 6x 3.5" for now.
April 17, 201115 yr Author Rajahal 6 foot is correct. I tend to buy everything from Newegg and all I found was a 6ft cable. It's wrapped up neatly inside. Neilt0 I was worried of getting the wrong one when I was trying to spec out memory so I ended up purchasing 2x2gb that i was sure would work. For what I'm using it for I didn't see the need to go with more, and I'm sure like most things I jump in head first and will end up re-buying later or in this case I bought to much and ended up with an Icydock single drive tray i'll never use. I have the 2.5 drive sitting under the frame towards the back away from the bunch of 4 pin power cables. Up top I have the 1.5tb drive sideways and I'm waiting on the last drive to arrive and I'll place it sideways next to it. With a plus license that maxes me out. Currently i'm only using 3tb of Blu-rays (MKV), Music, files/photos so I'll be set with a total of 9.5 when its done. Couldn't be happier.
April 18, 201115 yr Ugh... I really want to build one for the data I access frequently!! Nice build...
April 19, 201115 yr Welcome to MicroServer owners My todays uptime: root@EvgNas:~# uptime 18:28:22 up 73 days, 19:17, 1 user, load average: 0.38, 0.38, 0.36
April 19, 201115 yr Question: What would you say the temp and or noise level of these little guys? I'm wanting to build a lower power, low heat system for doing some low level Windows PC stuff and this little guy might be overkill for storage, but might be perfect for power.
April 19, 201115 yr I just wish we in the US could get the sweet rebate deal those of you in the UK have gotten. I'd love to buy two of these, but at $350/each, that's a bit steep.
April 19, 201115 yr Question: What would you say the temp and or noise level of these little guys? I'm wanting to build a lower power, low heat system for doing some low level Windows PC stuff and this little guy might be overkill for storage, but might be perfect for power. Temps run higher than my "wind tunnel" server -- it's a warm day here today (24 deg C or so) and I have a 7200rpm drive in heavy use that's at 40 deg. C, but I don't think I've seen temps much over that even during a parity check overnight during a cooler night. That's with 2 extra 3.5" drives in that top area. My 5400rpm drives are still in the 20s of deg. C It's not silent, but it's very, very quiet. Just one big fan for the drives and one for the PSU. It's a notebook chipset, so most of the cooling is passive.
April 19, 201115 yr I just wish we in the US could get the sweet rebate deal those of you in the UK have gotten. I'd love to buy two of these, but at $350/each, that's a bit steep. There are a lot of people over here with 2. At £120, it's sort of rude not to...
April 19, 201115 yr Question: What would you say the temp and or noise level of these little guys? I'm wanting to build a lower power, low heat system for doing some low level Windows PC stuff and this little guy might be overkill for storage, but might be perfect for power. Temps run higher than my "wind tunnel" server -- it's a warm day here today (24 deg C or so) and I have a 7200rpm drive in heavy use that's at 40 deg. C, but I don't think I've seen temps much over that even during a parity check overnight during a cooler night. That's with 2 extra 3.5" drives in that top area. My 5400rpm drives are still in the 20s of deg. C It's not silent, but it's very, very quiet. Just one big fan for the drives and one for the PSU. It's a notebook chipset, so most of the cooling is passive. Thanks for the detailed explination. Looks like it would be perfect.
April 20, 201115 yr Congrats in putting together such a nice and compact build! I would encourage you to play a bit with airflow and fan selection to give you a bit of headroom, and improve those temps. A hi-flow lo-noise fan, a PCI slot SFF silent fan (like the Deepcool Xfan I have in my case, for example), might be options for your little case. It's a very nice minimalist build. Congratulations! Ramon
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