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Fair enough, and you've been fortunate, but it's still a potential lottery that can be entirely avoided by using software RAID which really imposes so little overhead these days. Hardware RAID made more sense 10 or so years ago when CPU and IO performance was both low and expensive.

Hardware RAID is definitely overkill for this box, and it's not even something I'd recommend for more powerful and more expensive solutions since hardware RAID forces you to replace failed controllers with identical replacements (good luck doing so in 5-10 years time, maybe find one on eBay...)...

I would avoid any controller with vertical ports, or that has ports at the front by the IO plate for the very reasons you mention - card installation and cable management becomes a total nightmare with the lack of space due to the PSU being mounted above the card which will exert pressure on one...

Edit: Ooops - just realised I posted this to entirely the wrong forum! :) To fill in the blanks - the fan in my N36L PSU began making grinding noises after 15 months so I searched for a replacement. The HP original PSU fan is a T&T 4020HH12S-ND1 (40x40x20mm 12V DC sleeve bearing, 7000RPM...

@zero - your links are all broken (I'm not likely able to offer you any additional assistance but at least thought I'd let you know about your links!)

I was under the impression that a single disk ZIL was not considered a good idea, and that best practice is to use a mirrored ZIL because - for pool versions prior to v19 - if you lose your ZIL you may lose your entire array.

Old thread revival, but I just found this interesting post and although it relates to SSDs, it claims that the B5/181 "Program_Fail_Cnt_Total" SMART attribute - in a Crucial SSD - is an indication of 4K mapping (in)effectiveness, it's the number of unaligned reads and writes. Could this also be...

The rear system fan slides into a snug fitting frame, so I doubt there's any room for grommets. Maybe the PSU fan could be quietened somehow, but when operating normally these boxes are almost totally silent - it's only when they start buzzing and vibrating for no apparent reason that they can...

This is correct, only the newer 6Gb/s LSI controllers support 3TB+ - the older 3Gb/s adapters are limited to 2TB.

HP Microserver N40L, with AMD Turion II Model Neo CPU and 2GB RAM for $20/£10 more than the N36L. It seems the new CPU might be clocked at 1.5GHz rather than the 1.3GHz of the older AMD Athlon Neo in the N36L. Not a major improvement, but for only $20/£10 the extra speed might come in handy...

I suppose you could try the latest BIOS released Aug 2011, I'm going to try it now with the LSI 9211. Edit: Didn't work for me - no change.

I don't think the BIOS in the HP Microserver leaves enough "room" for the LSI BIOS to load - it's a common problem. I also get the same problem with an LSI 9211-8i in the N36L, but fortunately having flashed the 9211-8i with IT (Initiator Target) firmware I've got no reason to access the LSI...

Exactly, both vdevs are RAIDZ1, meaning I can lose up to 1 disk from each vdev before losing the whole array/zpool - this is adequate redundancy for me as I also have backups on a separate server. Unless you really need the performance, I think there's a lot to commend 5400RPM drives.

The 5400RPM 2TB disks are nice and quiet, cheap, and do the job! :) The 500GB drives just happened to be what I had lying around... I also configured another N36L for my brother with just the standard onboard SATA2 and another Intel CT NIC (the onboard Broadcom is totally busted in FreeBSD...

Merely future proofing - whether I actually bother with SATA3 disks in the future depends on my bank balance at the time. :) The 9211-8i is PCIe v2 8x which means it can sustain more than adequate throughput for 8 disks (500Mbytes/sec each lane), whether SATA2 or 3. The SAS3081E-R is PCIe...

Correct. I have 8x SATA2 spinning magnetic disks in my N36L (two vdevs, one zpool - 4x2TB 3.5", 4x500GB 2.5", all Samsung) at the moment and combined these are more than capable of saturating the Intel CT GigE NIC. Maybe later I will shuffle four of the HDD disks (probably the original...

As long as SATA2 and SATA3 are physically the same and differ only in terms of wire protocol, then I don't see why SATA3 disks won't work at full SATA3 speed with a 9211-8i using the N36L backplane.

Disable APM completely on the Samsungs - not 127, not 254, leave it disabled. The Samsung drives are "Green" drives and they have extremely aggressive power management which tries to park/unload the heads at every opportunity, literally within seconds any disk access. In FreeNAS, unless you...

Don't limit yourself for the sake of £20 - go buy an Intel NIC so you can put this issue behind you, and then you can use whatever build you like. For what it's worth, I built two N36L's both with the Intel NICs, one has been running FreeNAS 0.7.2 r5543 (embedded on 2GB USB stick) with ZFS and...

Yep. I tried various builds of FreeBSD and they all had problems with the bge0 driver. It's a very long standing issue, and seemingly there is no cure or no interest in finding a cure (as of 6 months ago anyway). I could always get the bge0 driver to hang then reset when performing bulk...

If you're going to attempt a fan swap, read this first!

I'd say the N36L is more than capable of what you want to do, soccermatt34. Don't forget to include a PSU in your home-build.

Maybe you're right, though it was my understanding (from people that mixed modules on the N36L) that errors were experienced. Personally, I wouldn't mix them but maybe that's just me. :)

The 1GB that comes with the box is an ECC module, so if you want to continue using that you'll need a second ECC module as you can't mix ECC and non-ECC modules. UDIMM means unbuffered. From the specs, the N36L supports the following memory: 1GB (1x1GB) Standard/8GB Maximum, using PC3-10600E...

As an XBMC client the stock HP N36L might be a little underpowered, mainly due to a fairly weak GPU, although you could add a better (preferably nVidia) PCIe based graphics adapter, but beware of heat and power consumption. 1) Depends on what you intend to do with it. 150W should be sufficient...

Working fine so far. FreeNAS 8.0-RELEASE lacks quite a few features but it does have a working ZFS and is stable. There is now 8.0.1-BETA2 available which improves the feature count somewhat (adds rsync and cron jobs, a better zfs importer, though rsync can only push data to a remote server...

It should be possible to install the x8 controller in the x16 slot and the negotiated PCIe link between motherboard chipset and controller will be x4 if that is the maximum supported by the slot. If it's not working, you may want to read this thread and see if it rings any bells... maybe you...

Indeed, even if Jason did decide to come back (assuming - and hoping - he is able to) there's no saying he won't disappear again further down the road leaving the project high and dry again. Unless a group of developers - rather than another individual to avoid a repeat of the current...

This is true, although the N36L can be maxed out with 8GB RAM which should allow you to divvy the memory up to obtain the best balance between ZFS and your VMs. Two 4GB sticks of non-ECC memory won't break the bank either. :)

Why do you want hardware RAID when something like ZFS is at least as good (particularly on the N36L)? I thought you might be looking at the P400 to drive more disks but if all you want is RAID across 4 disks then my advice would be to stick with the built-in N36L controller and run software...

No, the P400 uses two SFF-8484 connectors (the HP N36L uses an SFF-8087). I think you'd be better off with an LSI 9211-8i (up to 6GB SATA3) or IBM BR10i (up to 3GB SATA2) controller either of which can use the existing SFF-8087 internal cabling plus an additional 40-50cm SFF-8087 to 4 SATA/SAS...

Fingers crossed he is OK. It's great to see, but realistically I think all people are doing right now is keeping it on life support for those already using zfsguru (a move that is only necessary because of a rather bizarre dependency by the distribution on a website). Anyone about to...

Never got the email either so couldn't post, gave up waiting and have now moved on to something else. I guess zfsguru is now a dead distribution, which is a shame but always the risk with one man band projects. Even if he comes back, I think this episode just shows that it's a highly risky...

Has anyone worked out if the colour of the blue/red "HP" logo can be controlled by software (it lights red at boot, then almost immediately switches to blue). It would make a great "alert" beacon for when a disk needs attention, eg. flashing red! :)

The only comment I'd make about the 6x2.5" drive bay is that you're limiting yourself to the the thinnest 9.5mm (and therefore likely lowest capacity) 2.5" drives. A 4x2.5" bay such as the IcyDock can take drives up to 15mm thick. The current 1TB 2.5" drives are all 12.5mm (Toshiba) and 15mm...

No links, it was entirely subjective - I didn't particularly like the GUI which was very sluggish. Storage related performance seemed OK, but nothing particularly special. The uncertain future for OpenSolaris and it's derivatives is also another reason I'm not sure I want to commit long term to...

3TB is supported by the SAS 2008 chipset, in which case I would recommend something like the LSI 9211-8i or a re-branded equivalent. Edit: To support that comment, confirmation on the LSI site that all 6Gb/s LSI HBA's (ie. SAS2008) do support >3TB disks, while all 3Gb/s LSI HBAs will truncate...

Non-ECC memory also works absolutely fine in this server, just don't mix & match with ECC! :) Be careful when installing DIMMs with heat-spreaders, there's not much clearance above the DRAM slots. I installed a cheap Intel PRO/1000 in the PCIe x1 slot and an LSI 9211-8i in the PCIe x8 slot - I...

Apparently with pre-v19 ZFS you can lose the whole ZFS pool if the ZIL goes offline, hence mirroring the ZIL mitigates that risk. Although in a small home server, it's unlikely the performance benefit of a separate ZIL will be that significant, so I'm still not sure what route to take. My...

Interesting, I had a 9240-8i but gave up on it as a bad job (too little support in almost all distributions, RAID-only firmware, so just not worth the hassle) and swapped it for a 9211-8i flashed with IT firmware. The 9211 is well supported by distributions and running very nicely in an HP...