HP N54L MICROSERVER FUN... OR NOT
My little Netgear Sparc based ReadyNas ran out of space and seeing it is limited to 2tb drives I realised I need to upgrade to something new. I was leaning heavily towards a ASUSTOR 304, but then somehow I ended up on another route.. HP had their (very frequent) cashback offer on the N54L microserver. Once again I found myself thinking - lets go the Linux route, it will be better, I won't be tied in to some locked down OS. I won't be frustrated when I need a feature my NAS doesn't have etc...
I did however forget that I have tinkered with Linux before... many times! And every time I've come to the same conclusion, LINUX is FANTASTIC!!! If you want to lose your sanity, all spare time, health and your marriage!!
Well that's too late now ... kind of. I figured that hey I got the box cheap (like less than £100... if the cashback comes through that is!) and it will go back up to £300ish soon so I can always flog it. And I still might!
First thing I did was order a USB3 card seeing I'll need to move data over and I hate waiting. Next up was a graphics card... it doesn't really need this, but having HDMI is handy seeing I have a spare HDMI port on my screen.
I then 'discovered' Xpenology on the miriad of N54L forums and seeing everybody was jumping and raving about it - I thought why not give it a spin.
After hacking the BIOS to allow for faster access to the onboard SATA and external eSATA ports, I got a big 4TB WD Red drive. Installed Xpenology on the box's 250gb drive that came with it and then added the 4TB. All seemed good for about an hour... then somehow the 4TB died.
A couple of days worth of testing and transferring the drive to several other machines it seems it is just one big brick full of bad sectors. No idea if this is down to Xpenology or not? Ok so I ordered a Hitachi 4TB after reading good reviews on that. Finally added that to the little box and started to transfer my music over from my Netgear NAS.
Transfer speeds were atrocious .... further reading suggest the onboard NIC is a bit crap.. but now I don't have any more PCI slots for a dedicated NIC card.... This is starting to feel like a bad idea.
One of the neat features of Xpenology is that it comes with a plugin for PLEX - so I populated PLEX with my fresh load of music. This worked really good, but then I noticed there's a newer version of Xpenology so I decided to 'upgrade' to 4.3...
Disaster... after the upgrade PLEX failed to load no matter what I tried. Eventually I deleted it and installed a version straight from the PLEX website. And uninstalled all versions of Python on the box and voila it seems to be up and running again.
Next mission will be to load my photos and movies....
In theory everything should just run fine after that... but hey... it's still based on LINUX so that means I will HAVE to tinker... Seeing the box is rather ugly I am thinking I might get an OLED panel and install it in the front to show various system info and maybe even the odd RSS feed... now that will be neat... but then again what about my happy marriage...