Louwrentius

Introduction

In the summer of 2017, HP released the Proliant Microserver Gen10. This machine replaces the older Gen8 model.

For hobbyists, the Microserver always has been an interesting device for a custom home NAS build or as a router.

Let's find out if this is still the case.

Price

In The Netherlands, the price of the entry-level model is similar to the Gen8: around €220 including taxes.

CPU

The new AMD X3216 processor has slightly better single threaded performance as compared to the older G1610t in the Gen8. Overall, both devices seem to have similar CPU performance.

The biggest difference is the TDP: 35 Watt for the Celeron vs 15 Watt for the AMD CPU.

Memory

By default, it has 8 GB of unbuffered ECC memory, that's 4 GB more than the old model. Only one of the two memory slots is occupied, so you can double that amount just by adding another 8 GB stick. It seems that 32 GB is the maximum.

Storage

This machine has retained the four 3.5" drive slots. There are no drive brackets anymore. Before inserting a hard drive, you need to remove a bunch of screws from the front of the chassis and put four of them in the mounting holes of each drive. These screws then guide the drive through grooves into the drive slot. This caddy-less design works perfectly and the drive is mounted rock-solid in it's position.

To pop a drive out, you have to press the appropriate blue lever, which latches on to one of the front screws mounted on your drive and pulls it out of the slot.

There are two on-board sata controllers.

00:11.0 SATA controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD] FCH SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 49)
01:00.0 SATA controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. 88SE9230 PCIe SATA 6Gb/s Controller (rev 11)

The Marvell controller is connected to the four drive bays. The AMD controller is probably connected to the fifth on-board SATA port.

As with the Gen8, you need a floppy-power-connector-to-sata-power-connector cable if you want to use a SATA drive with the fifth onboard SATA port.

Due to the internal SATA header or the USB2.0 header, you could decide to run the OS without redundancy and use all four drive bays for storage. As solid state drives tend to be very reliable, you may use a small SSD to keep the cost and power usage down and still retain reliability (although not the level of reliability RAID1 provides).

Networking

Just as the Gen8, the Gen10 has two Gigabit network cards. The brand and model is: Broadcom Limited NetXtreme BCM5720

As tested with iperf3 I get full 1 Gbit network performance. No problems here (tested on CentOS 7).

PCIe slots

This model has two half-height PCIe slots (1x and 8x in a 4x and 8x physical slot) which is an improvement over the single PCIe slot in the Gen8.

USB

The USB configuration is similar to the Gen8, with both USB2 and USB3 ports and one internal USB2 header on the motherboard.

Sidenote: the onboard micro SD card slot as found in the Gen8 is not present in the Gen10.

Graphics

The Gen10 has also a GPU build-in but I have not looked into it as I have no use for it.

The Gen10 differs in output options as compared to the Gen8: it supports one VGA and two displayport connections. Those displayport connectors could make the Gen10 an interesting DIY HTPC build, but I have not looked into it.

iLO

The Gen10 has no support for iLO. So no remote management, unless you have an external KVM-over-IP solution.

This is a downside, but for home users, this is probably not a big deal. My old Microserver N40L didn't have iLO and it never bothered me.

And most of all: iLO is a small on-board mini-comuter that increases idle power consumption. So the lack of iLO support should mean better idle power consumption.

Boot

Both Legacy and UEFI boot is supported. I have not tried UEFI booting.

Booting from the 5th internal SATA header is supported and works fine (as opposed to the Gen8).

For those who care: booting is a lot quicker as opposed to the Gen8, which took ages to get through the BIOS.

Power Usage

I have updated this segment as I have used some incorrect information in the original article.

The Gen10 seems to consume 14 Watt at idle, booted into Centos 7 without any disk drives attached (removed all drives after booting). This 14 Watt figure is reported by my external power meter.

Adding a single old 7200 1 TB drive drives power usage up to 21 Watt (as expected).

With four older 7200 RPM drives the entire system uses about 43 Watt according to the external power meter.

As an experiment, I've put two old 60 GB 2.5" laptop drives in the first two slots, configured as RAID1. Then I added two 1 TB 7200 RPM drives to fill up the remaining slots. This resulted in a power usage of 32 Watt.

Dimensions and exterior

Exactly the same as the Gen8, they stack perfectly.

The Gen8 had a front door protecting the drive bays connected to the chassis with two hinges. HP has been cheap on the Gen10, so when you open the door, it basically falls off, there's no hinge. It's not a big issue, the overall build quality of the Gen10 is excellent.

I have no objective measurements of noise levels, but the device seems almost silent to me.

Evaluation and conclusion

At first, I was a bit disappointed about the lack of iLO, but it turned out for the best. What makes the Gen10 so interesting is the idle power consumption. The lack of iLO support probably contributes to the improved idle power consumption.

The Gen8 measures between 30 and 35 Watt idle power consumption, so the Gen10 does fare much better (~18 Watt).

Firewall/Router

At this level of power consumption, the Gen10 could be a formidable router/firewall solution. The only real downside is it's size as compared to purpose-built firewalls/routers. The two network interfaces may provide sufficient network connectivity but if you need more ports and using VLANs is not enough, it's easy to add some extra ports.

If an ancient N40L with a piss-poor Atom processor can handle a 500 Mbit internet connection, this device will have no problems with it, I'd presume. Once I've taken this device into production as a replacement for my existing router/firewall, I will share my experience.

Storage / NAS

The Gen8 and Gen10 both have four SATA drive bays and a fifth internal SATA header. From this perspective, nothing has changed. The reduced idle power consumption could make the Gen10 an even more attractive option for a DIY home grown NAS.

All things considered I think the Gen10 is a great device and I have not really encountered any downsides. If you have no problems putting a bit of effort into a DIY solution, the Gen10 is a great platform for a NAS or Router/Firewall, that can compete with most purpose-build devices.

I may update this article as I gain more experience with this device.

If you want to build a home server, it may be advised to actually use server-grade components. I documented the reasons for choosing server-grade hardware already in an earlier post on this topic.

It is recommended to read the old post first. In this new post, I only show new hardware that could also be chosen as a more modern hardware option.

My original post dates back to December 2013 and centers around the popular X9SCM-F which is based on the LGA 1155 socket. Please note that the X9SCM-F / LGA 1155 based solution may be cheaper if you want the Xeon processor.

So I'd like to introduce two Supermicro motherboards that may be of interest.

Supermicro X10SLL-F

Some key features are:

• 2 x Gigabit NIC on-board
• 6 onboard SATA ports
• 3 x PCIe (2 x 8x + 1 x 4x)
• Costs $169 or €160

This board is one of the cheapest Supermicro boards you can get and it has 3 x PCI-e, which may be of interest if you need to install extra HBA's or RAID cards, SAS expanders and/or network controllers.

Supermicro X10SL7-F

This board is about $80 or €90 more expensive than the X10SLL-F but in return, you get eight extra SAS/SATA ports, for a total of 14 SATA ports. With 4 TB drives, this would give you 56 TB of raw storage capacity. This motherboard provides a cheaper solution than an add-on HBA card, which would occupy a PCIe slot. Hoever, the's a caveat: this board has 'only' two PCIe slots. But there's still room for an additional quad-port or 10 Gbe NIC and an extra HBA if required.

• 2 x Gigabit NIC on-board
• 6 onboard SATA ports
• 8 onboard SAS/SATA ports via LSI 2308 chip
• 2 x PCIe (8x and 4x)
• Costs $242 or €250

Overview of CPU's

• Dollars are from Newegg, Euro's are from Tweakers.net.
• Euros are including taxes.

Update 2012-12-11: It seems that a new and faster version is on the horizon.

Update 2012-12-21: Yes, the new model G7 N54L is out.

Some products seem almost too good to be true and I think the HP Proliant Microserver N40L is one of them. If you are into the market for a very small, silent, efficient, yet capable home server, please take this device into consideration. I picked this device up for 200 euro's which is a bargain in my opinion.

First, take a look. As you can determine from the size of the 5 1/4 inch bay, this device is really small. The fun thing is though, that behind that door is room for four 3.5 inch SATA hard drives.

So you can put four large SATA disks into this device. It is just ideal as a home NAS, without resorting to expensive QNAP or Synology devices, which may not give you the flexibility you want.

The on-board RAID controller only seems to support RAID 0 and RAID 1. If you want to make a NAS out of this device you want to go for RAID 5. So you have two options.

1. Buy an additional hardware RAID controller that supports RAID 5;
2. Use Linux or BSD software RAID and don't spend a dime.

Processor

It contains the AMD equivalent of Intel's Atom processor, the Turion II Neo N40L dual-core, which runs at 1.5 Ghz. This CPU is not fast, but it is energy efficient and it helps keeping the device silent and cheap.

Memory

The device contains just 2 GB of ECC RAM. Sufficient for most tasks, but you can crank it up to 8 GB. The fact that you get ECC RAM in this device is a real plus, making this device extra reliable.

Disks

By default, a 250 GB disks is included. How they do that for this money is something I don't get. This disk takes up one of the four drive bays.

Personally, I would not use the 5 1/4 slot for an optical drive, (who uses them anyway in a server), instead, I would look into a solution where you can put the stock drive into that space, to make room for an additional disk for file storage. Useful in case you are building a NAS.

You may even install additional 2.5" disks with solutions like this.

Expansion

The microserver has two half-height PCIe slots, one x16 and one x1. It has also an esata connector at the back, so you can connect an external disks for backups or something. There are two USB ports at the back, four at the front. I wish they put four at the back and two at the front.

See also this page.

Environment

The device is very economic, I estimate power consumption at about 25 watt when idle. I measured 35 watt through my UPS, but there where also two external disk drives and a network switch connected to the UPS.

Noise levels are also excelent. There are just two fans. One very large fan at the back, that just seem to cool the entire device. The second fan is housed inside the tiny power supply, but although it is small, the fan makes little noise. When it is idle, you don't hear this server running.

Compatibility

I was able to install Ubuntu 12.04 LTS out-of-the-box. Is running fine. I didn't test any other operating systems.

Reason for purchase

I wanted to replace my Linux router (an old Mac Mini) with a device that can house two disk drives, so I could implement RAID 1. I use it as a Router/Firewall. But I also run a website on it, some monitoring software, so that's why I didn't want to buy a regular Linksys or Zytel embedded router.

Although this server has only one network interface, I use VLAN tagging with a VLAN-capable switch, so this is not a problem. Otherwise, I would just add a second Gigabyte half-height PCIe NIC.

Final words

It's an ideal device for any computer enthousiast who wants more flexibility than a standard NAS or embedded router can offer. It's cheap, small, silent and power efficient. Those HP engineers who created this device should get a thumbs up.