HP MicroServer

Want to talk about one of the articles in SPCR? Here's the forum for you.
obvious
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Re: HP MicroServer

Post by obvious » Sun Sep 14, 2014 11:30 am

For my N54L I just bought a Scythe Slim Slip Stream 2000 SY1212SL12L

Comes with 3-pin to Molex adapter
37.0 dBA / 45.5 CFM / 2000 RPM
120 x 120 x 12 mm
37.0 dBA / 45.5 CFM / DC12 V / 0.25 A
3-pin - 4pin adaptor included
Sleeve Bearing

What are my chances?

EDIT: http://www.scytheus.com/product/slipstream-120mm-slim/ suggests it's only 1200rpm ?

I'm not so good at this. I'm not even sure if it's PWM?

Kiff
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Joined: Fri Sep 19, 2014 7:52 am

Re: HP MicroServer

Post by Kiff » Fri Sep 19, 2014 8:32 am

Thanks for the excellent guide on swapping the fan in the HP Microservers.

Using it I've just successfully fitted an Akasa Piranha 120mm pwm to my N54L. The specs are similar to the Scythe SY1225SL12HPVC fitted in the original article and I too get an rpm in the low 700's when running.

Dimension 120 X 120 X 25mm
Bearing HDB (Hydro Dynamic Bearing)
Speed 600-1900 RPM
Max airflow 79.13 CFM
Sound level 6.4-27.2 dB(A)
Max static air pressure 3.04 mm-H2O
Rated voltage 12V
Connector PWM-4pin
Product code AK-FN072

It was on offer for £4.99 for a week only here: http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showprodu ... =FG-073-AK

Not sure about the Piranha tooth blade design, but it is certainly a lot quieter now and ready for living room use.

I'm a bit concerned about the system temperatures though. Before modification I was getting 1150 rpm and 27/50/50 System/CPU/Northbridge temps in degrees C. Afterwards I'm getting 725 rpm and 31/70/65.

Do you know what figures you are getting with your server under the stairs? It would me give a bit of reassurance that I'm not going to fry my new N54L if I knew you were getting similar figures and yours had been running just fine for the past 3 years or more.

MikeC
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Re: HP MicroServer

Post by MikeC » Fri Sep 19, 2014 11:01 am

Kiff wrote:Do you know what figures you are getting with your server under the stairs? It would me give a bit of reassurance that I'm not going to fry my new N54L if I knew you were getting similar figures and yours had been running just fine for the past 3 years or more.
Here's a screen capture of the sensors just 20 mins ago. It doesn't change much as the system never gets hammered for long. It's also quite cool in the closet right now, probably 20C tops.
You do not have the required permissions to view the files attached to this post.

nicolbiden
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Re: HP MicroServer

Post by nicolbiden » Sun Dec 20, 2015 11:22 pm

WR304 wrote:I've got a HP N40L Microserver at the moment. The stock unit is quite noisy, most of the noise coming from the PSU.

The Scythe Slipstream fan mod mentioned in the SPCR article is easy to do and works well. There's a torx key included inside the server's case door that you can use for removing the fan.

It's worth bearing in mind that not all Picopsu models will fit in the HP N40L Microserver. The Picopsu 160-XT power supply, which has four capacitors, is too tall and won't slide underneath the hard drive bay.

http://www.itx-warehouse.co.uk/Product. ... uctID=1310

The 120 watt Picopsu, which has two capacitors, is smaller. I've got one on order to try instead.

http://www.itx-warehouse.co.uk/Product. ... ductID=533

I'm going to use a Samsung 830 128gb SSD for the operating system. One of these Icy Dock EZConvert MB882SP-1S-2B 2.5" to 3.5" SATA SSD / Hard Drive Converter lets you put an SSD in one of the main drive bays.

http://www.icydock.com/goods.php?id=77

I was originally building this server with stock parts for someone else. It was going to be in a garage as their home server. It was to have the 250gb Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 drive for the Windows Home Server 2011 operating system and then a pair of 3TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 drives in Raid 1 for data storage. It was all working fine and seemed very stable, no problems using the 3TB hard drives either. They show up in the BIOS and you initialise them as GPT partition through Windows Disk Management to use their full capacity.

Then the mains power lead was accidentally unplugged whilst the server was running, as though there had been a power cut...

You wouldn't think an unscheduled shutdown would be a big deal but when the server was rebooted it had lost the raid array in the BIOS, all the data drive shares had vanished in Windows Home Server 2011 and the two 3TB drives which had used GPT file partitions were showing as no longer initialised also. The main 250gb operating system drive with its MBR partition was fine and still working normally

In a way it was good that it happened whilst I was still setting it up. If all the data had been lost from both of the Raid drives when it was in use that would have been much worse. It would have been connected to a UPS for normal use, reducing the risk from a power cut. Even so, having the potential for losing everything like that with the 3TB drives was too much of a risk. I ended up using a Synology DS213+ NAS box for the garage install instead, leaving me with this HP Microserver. The plan now is to get some 2TB drives for it (using MBR partitions), AHCI BIOS mode, not have the drives mirrored and instead use a scheduled robocopy to back one drive up onto the other drive.
More about......Robocopy

Biden

Techboy
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Re: HP MicroServer

Post by Techboy » Wed Dec 14, 2016 7:57 am

I have installed a new fan:

Noctua NF-F12 PPC 2000 IP67 Noctua NF-F12 IndustrialPPC 2000RPM IP67 PWM 120mm High Performance Fan
http://noctua.at/en/nf-f12-industrialppc-2000-ip67-pwm

but as per the first fan that was tested in the article, my fan spins up as the system starts, then it stops and the system shuts down after the 15 second countdown.

The fan has a maximum RPM of 2000, but a minimum RPM of 450. Could the minimum RPM be what is causing the fan to not work (i.e. it needs to be over 550 RPM)?

I am asking because you said that the BIOS operates the fan at a duty cycle of 35% of the maximum RPM - this would be 700 RPM. Although you also say that the board might operate at different duty cycles, so my fan might fall below the 550 RPM...

MikeC
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Re: HP MicroServer

Post by MikeC » Wed Dec 14, 2016 2:59 pm

Techboy wrote:I have installed a new fan:

Noctua NF-F12 PPC 2000 IP67 Noctua NF-F12 IndustrialPPC 2000RPM IP67 PWM 120mm High Performance Fan
http://noctua.at/en/nf-f12-industrialppc-2000-ip67-pwm

but as per the first fan that was tested in the article, my fan spins up as the system starts, then it stops and the system shuts down after the 15 second countdown.

The fan has a maximum RPM of 2000, but a minimum RPM of 450. Could the minimum RPM be what is causing the fan to not work (i.e. it needs to be over 550 RPM)?

I am asking because you said that the BIOS operates the fan at a duty cycle of 35% of the maximum RPM - this would be 700 RPM. Although you also say that the board might operate at different duty cycles, so my fan might fall below the 550 RPM...
If the max rpm is 2k @ 12V, it should work fine. Min rpm simply tells lowest reliable run (or start) speed. Actual speed is determined by % duty cycle in PWM or voltage. Not sure why it wouldn't behave like other similar (speed) fans used on this machine by us & others. IIRC, that Noctua is also available as a 24V version -- is it possible that yours is the 24V version? That would explain the behavior.

Techboy
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Re: HP MicroServer

Post by Techboy » Thu Dec 15, 2016 9:09 am

I've just checked and it's definitely the 12V version.

MikeC
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Re: HP MicroServer

Post by MikeC » Thu Dec 15, 2016 1:32 pm

Techboy wrote:I've just checked and it's definitely the 12V version.
Not sure what to tell you. Perhaps that fan just doesn't play well with the Microserver PWM system. :?:

Techboy
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Joined: Wed Dec 14, 2016 7:47 am

Re: HP MicroServer

Post by Techboy » Sat Dec 17, 2016 7:08 am

Okay, thanks for the help. I'll send the fan back and swap it for something else.

Techboy
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Re: HP MicroServer

Post by Techboy » Thu Dec 22, 2016 3:08 pm

I fitted a Coolink SWiF2-1200 Fan 120P 120 x 120 x 25 instead

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00 ... UTF8&psc=1

Works well - and I like the colour :D

riahc3
Posts: 1
Joined: Sun Feb 12, 2017 3:01 pm

Re: HP MicroServer

Post by riahc3 » Sun Feb 12, 2017 3:03 pm

Has anyone installed a Noctua fan? They are the most quiet fans on the market and I think its what my N54L needs...

Techboy
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Re: HP MicroServer

Post by Techboy » Mon Mar 06, 2017 4:12 pm

Hi riahc3, yes I tried one and couldn't get it to work. See my posts above.

julian67
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Joined: Sat Jul 06, 2019 2:01 pm

Re: HP MicroServer

Post by julian67 » Sat Jul 06, 2019 2:17 pm

Just posting to confirm that an Akasa Apache Black 120mm works great in my N40L. The pin out mod is very easy, thanks to everyone for the info. The fan is essentially silent; I could just about hear it when I tried it outside of the case and it was right next to my ear. 1 foot away and I can't hear it. I bought my used N40L this week and have been fortunate to get one with a fairly quiet PSU fan, so am quite happy with the noise level. I installed a modified BIOS to enable AHCI for the fifth SATA port. The OS is on an old SSD on SATA 5 and there are 4 HDDs in the box. I installed Debian Buster from USB stick and everything works perfectly for a headless NAS box.

One thing to look out for: on a minimal install the ssh daemon is so incredibly slow to start that it appears not to be enabled. The solution is to install rng-tools5 see https://packages.debian.org/sid/utils/rng-tools5
The rngd daemon acts as a bridge between a Hardware TRNG (true random number generator) such as the ones in some Intel/AMD/VIA chipsets, and the kernel's PRNG (pseudo-random number generator).
and all is well on next boot.

It's great to be able to put together a capable 4 bay NAS at truly minimal expense so the review and follow up info in this thread has been really useful.

MikeC
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Re: HP MicroServer

Post by MikeC » Sun Jul 07, 2019 11:48 pm

julian67 wrote:Just posting to confirm that an Akasa Apache Black 120mm works great in my N40L. The pin out mod is very easy, thanks to everyone for the info..... It's great to be able to put together a capable 4 bay NAS at truly minimal expense so the review and follow up info in this thread has been really useful.
You're welcome. Amazing that this article is still being read, the thread still active! :shock: :) 8 years in tech is something like a lifetime and a half?! :lol:

julian67
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Re: HP MicroServer

Post by julian67 » Tue Jul 09, 2019 4:31 am

It is a long time! But looking at new NAS boxes the one thing that truly impresses me (in the wrong way) is the horribly big price for what is essentially a very simple PC. The CPUs in modern NAS aren't exactly a huge advance on an ancient Turion unless one needs to perform video transcoding on the NAS. I guess the power management and consumption is superior but it was hardly terrible anyway. The ability to run ECC RAM is a step up from many consumer boxes. The esata port has fallen out of favour but is incredibly useful: it supports port multiplier so you can add an old 2 or 4 box enclosure and have all the disks work as if installed in the bays, or you can use it to easily add temporary capacity for operations such as swapping a disk out of a physical or logical volume group. I bought my N40L (complete with original 256GB HP/Seagate Barracuda disk!) for £65 inc. shipping. I disassembled and inspected it and cleaned out a lot of years of dust, replaced the case fan (£8.50 on ebay) and BIOS and all is good. Grand total: £73.50 (US $91.50). Thanks to the PCI-E slots for another £20 approx. I could add an extra NIC and set up link aggregation or add USB 3.0 or Wireless AC. I'm fairly sure that these old Proliants would struggle a little running Windows Server or a BSD using ZFS, but they are more than adequate for a headless Debian system serving files and running UPnP multimedia server, syncthing, bittorrent client, Calibre book server, VPN, taking care of my Let's Encrypt cert, and more.

My impression on disassembling the Proliant was that it is really well designed and made of excellent quality components. It did occur to me that for the same price I could not buy even the cheapest low quality 4 disk USB 3.0 or esata (not NAS) enclosure. There is a lively market for these old Proliants on ebay and it's easy to see why.

Luckski
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Re: HP MicroServer

Post by Luckski » Tue Aug 11, 2020 1:45 am

Well i bought a HP microserver and it came and failed to boot No Fan Detected so i was refunded £20
easy just replace fan i thought
Purchased a Noiseblocker Blacksilent fan XPL 120 PWM and checked connection and swamped pins but still had an issue booting.

So hunted and found this thread.
Now ordering a Akasa Apache Black 120mm fingers crossed this works

Techboy
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Joined: Wed Dec 14, 2016 7:47 am

Re: HP MicroServer

Post by Techboy » Tue Aug 11, 2020 4:41 am

Good luck :-)

Just a note to say that the Coolink SWiF2-1200 Fan I fitted in December 2016 worked great for 4 years.

I still have the server, all working but no longer used as I have replaced it with a Synology (which I am very happy with).

Luckski
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Re: HP MicroServer

Post by Luckski » Thu Aug 20, 2020 6:46 am

well update the Akasa Apache Black 120mm does not fire the unit up.
i have been told it could possible be the board,
looking at getting a second unit so at least i can test board and fan see if i am wasting time :)

CA_Steve
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Re: HP MicroServer

Post by CA_Steve » Thu Aug 20, 2020 8:14 am

You could try a voltmeter to see if the board is providing any Vdc...

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