An excited new G7 Microserver owner

[oj88]

My company just surprised us and cleared out about 40 units of brand new and never been opened N40L Microservers to employees.

 

I bought 6. Very hard to pass up when they were being sold for just $33 each. I would've gotten more if they weren't sold out in 10 minutes! I might sell off the others and just keep 2-3 for myself.

 

I'll use these to play around with Sophos, XPEnology, NVRs, WinSvr2k12r2/Hyper-V, and then some. I know that these machines are a bit dated and aren't particularly powerful by today's standards, but for lab use, I don't think it would matter much. I've been envious of the likes of schoondoggy, ikon, and the other usual suspects long enough

 

Anything else to add to this laundry list of things to try out?

[ikon]

That's fantastic for you. At only $33 each, these units seem ripe for a CPU replacement. Give them a little more power, and longevity.

[oj88]

I'm not sure I follow. Doesn't these boards have soldered-on CPUs?

[schoondoggy]

The Gen8 is the first MicroServer that has a socketed CPU. The older ones are soldered.

The N40l make a nice FreeNAS box.

[ikon]

Sorry. My bad. I knew the N40L was soldered, but I thought the N54L was socketed. Nothing to see here... move along, move along

[oj88]

LOL. Somebody's slipping.

 

But yeah, it would've been great if the CPU was upgradeable. For a while there, you got my hopes up.

 

@Schoondoggy,

 

I'll definitely build a NAS. I've had very good luck running XPEnology on an N36L in the office and I was going to do the same on one of the N40L. But I might just revisit FreeNAS.

 

The other one or two, I can put them on lab/testbed duty. Speaking of which, I read that the G7 can take in 2x8GB (16GB total) of RAM 'unofficially'. But will that still make any sense if I only got a 2-core CPU? Can you cite VM workload examples that will still work on the N40L?

[oj88]

I recently got a Zalman ZM-VE300. As it didn't came with a drive, I had to look around my parts bin for some 2.5" laptop drives. I found a couple and needed a way to check them out quickly.... write zeroes and run diagnostics. USB to SATA adapters tend to be slow and in one case, didn't pass through SMART parameters to the OS. I'm using HD Sentinel.

 

G7 MS to the rescue.

 

How's it hanging? The drives 'snaps' into the SATA ports and can actually support the weight of the 2.5" drives. Despite that, I still put in a rubber thingy underneath the drives for additional support.

 

[Joe_Miner]

Great picture! +1

 

Those are handy little machines to have around

[oj88]

I noticed that the area I have the server on is quite dusty. I have a sheet of unused A/C filter media around so I cut a square piece slightly bigger than the microserver's door and voila!
 
This was when it was new:

 
... and just 10 days later.

 

It's easier to clean or replace just the filter IMO and I don't even have to shut down the server.

 

As it is expected, airflow is slightly reduced, but it doesn't seem to cause any increase in internal temp based on the sensor readouts. But I may need to tape up the unused USB ports and the crevice around the ODD bay as I can feel some air flowing through them.

 

I just don't want it to look like the box below. This is the one I have in the office.

 

[Joe_Miner]

Kind of looks like my Son's N40L did after about a year -- it was full of dust bunnies and dog hair -- I was surprised the thing still worked!  Those N40L's are tough little machines!