Originally posted April 22, 2012

After my MicroServers arrived I realized I was in need of a new KVM switch (Keyboard, Video, Mouse, allows you to use a keyboard, screen, and mouse with one or more computers) as the two port Belkin USB Flip wasn’t going to be enough – I wanted at least a four port one. Two ports for the MicroServers, one for the DL360 and one for the file server. I looked at IPKVM switches but I quickly realized that they would have been too expensive for a home network. My criteria, then, was a four port KVM, with USB (as the microservers didn’t have PS/2 ports) and VGA.

Enter the Belkin SOHO 4-Port KVM Switch

I found this on the Novatech websites – as they were based in Portishead and it was the school holiday I decided I could take a trip down to get it rather than waiting for delivery from eBuyer or similar – and it looked ideal. There were a couple of other models with more ports and rack mountable but that would have been getting expensive. As bad luck would have it Novatech didn’t have it in stock so it was ordered in for me on the Tuesday I went down and was ready for me to pick up on the following Saturday.

First impressions were very good. Solid base unit with four colour coded buttons, and four chunky colour coded leads of a decent length that took the video, audio and USB data to the computers (I didn’t actually realize it had sound capability). Through voodoo or magic the end that went into the computer had audio, video (mic, speakers) and USB, while the switch end just had video and audio – I guess the USB must be done over the VGA. Unfortunately three of the machines I was plugging into the KVM didn’t have sound/mic ports so I tied them back along the main cable to keep them out of the way.

Once installed it sat quite nicely underneath my screen, plugged into the VGA for the screen, two USB ports for a mouse/keyboard and a set of headphones. The switch also features two USB ports, one on the back, one on the side, that act as a USB hub and can be presented to the machines as if a USB stick was plugged into the system itself, however switching between machines disconnects the USB meaning you can’t start a copy one one computer and switch to another while the transfer is running. Switching between computers is quick and the mouse/keyboard picks up with no delay, unlike the Belkin Flip I was using before. Pressing the middle of the button switches both audio and video output to that machine, pushing the left hand side switches to just the video and the right is just the audio – so you could listen to music from one machine while using another.

Really, for £114, it’s quite good value, although the downside is that you can’t use your own VGA cables with it, it has to be the Belkin ones – the longer cables are quite expensive. Due to it’s size and form factor it’s only really good for the small home/office or lab setup – anything more and you’ll probably need to start looking at IPKVM switches – but if there was a 8 port variant of this KVM that would almost certainly be worth a look. If you spent the time shopping around you could probably get it for under £100 then it’s definitely worth it.

Edit November 2012 – The unit recently failed on me – not working at all. No lights and no beep when pressing the buttons to change input. Returned to Novatech/Belkin under warranty and they replaced it with a new one. Unfortunate but good service.

Originally posted on September 2, 2012

While I’ve been a fan of PC gaming I’ve not always gone for the best components and instead gone for bundles. My desktop CPU and Motherboard were a bundle from Maplins and so were the case and the graphics card. CPU is a quad-core AMD Athlon II X4 630 at 2.8GHz and motherboard is a ECS GeForce6100PM based on the nVIDIA nForce 6100-430 chipset. The graphics card was a basic XFX Radeon HD 5450 which, while has served me well in the past, was starting to struggle. While it was fairly happy with Minecraft, Battlefield 2 and 2142 could only be ran on middling settings and sometimes World in Conflict and Supreme Commander 2 slowed with a lot of particle effects. Just Cause 2 was unplayable and was like watching a slideshow, while Crysis 2 ran at 15-20 FPS and Battlefield Bad Company 2 seemed to run okay but was very sluggish on the controls.

So it was time for an upgrade. After reading up I decided on either a Radeon 7850 (MSI Twin Frozor) or 7870 (XFX Core edition) and in the end I went for the 7870. So I found myself on my way to Novatech to pick it up and see what it can do.

I also upgraded my power supply from an Artic 500W (originally from eBuyer) to a Novatech 600W (rebadged OCZ or Corsair, according to the sales consultant). 500W is minimum reccomended for the 7870 but for £60 the Novatech was a good buy for a modular PSU.

First impressions when I got home is that this was a big card – a lot bigger than I was expecting. I knew it was a double-slot card but at nearly 25cm long it overlapped 3 out of 4 SATA ports on my motherboard meaning I had to disable the CD/DVD drive. The size of the card is 24.10 x 3.80 x 11.10 cm which, compared to the 5450 it replaced, also dwarfed it.

Top: XFX Radeon 7870. Bottom: XFX Radeon 5450.

Fitting wasn’t an issue as I had to take the PSU out as well to replace it. This was my first modular power supply as well which I found a lot easier to manage compare to the Artic it replaced with the spare cables training everywhere.

Fired the machine up, re-ran the Windows 7 Experience Index tests (raised gaming graphics from 5.1 to 7.9), updated the latest drivers and was met with Just Cause 2 running the benchmarking tests at a spectacular 75 FPS.

A truly excellent card well worth the money.

Specs:

Name: XFX Radeon HD 7870 Core Edition
Memory: 2GB
Memory Clock: 4.8GHz
Clock Speed: 1GHz
Cooling: Single Fan
Video outputs: 1x HDMI, 2x DVI, 2x Displayport
Price: £199.99 (Novatech, £220 eBuyer)

Originally Posted April 23, 2012

I’ve had my MicroServers for a while now, I’ve upgraded the RAM to 4GB/each, installed a couple of OS’s onto them and played about with them. Here’s what’s happened.

First thing I wanted to try is putting Ubuntu Server on them. Installed without problems (installing from a USB stick created with uNetBootin) however when the USB was removed and the machine restarted the BIOS spash screen flicked up, ran through it’s configuration and then the screen switched off as no display input was being recieved – which I thought was odd because even the console should have been displayed. I had a look online and it appears that GRUB (the Ubuntu boot loader) was installed /dev/sda which was the USB stick. When I’ve got some more time (during the holidays) I might go back and put Ubuntu back on them again but I dropped Server 2008 Web on them to use in the short-term.

I also took the decision of upgrading the RAM – from 2GB to 4GB with a PNY 4GB stick each, the RAM spec was “PC3-10666 1333 MHz DDR3, Unbuffered, non ECC”. The 2 GB that comes with the MicroServer are ECC RAM so the modules cannot be mixed for 6GB (as I found out, I didn’t remember that the ones included were ECC). HP Part number for the RAM installed was 500209-161. I also thought that the ones I bought were going to be too small and the MicroServer used a smaller RAM form factor but happily I was wrong.

Installing the RAM meant you needed to unscrew two thumbscrews holding the motherboard tray down (I used the door-mounted Allen key to make this easier), a number of headers, the power supply, the Mini-SAS cable (which was quite tough) and almost forgot the VGA, USB and Ethernet cable in the back. The tray came out quite nicely, RAM was put in the slot (of which there are two, I think it’ll take up to 8GB) and then cabled back in. You might have some difficulty getting the cables back to their original position but after a couple of goes you’ll probably be fine. There’s also an on board SATA port that you could use if you wanted to put a CD/DVD drive in or a 3.5″ drive in the 5.25″ bay.

One final word – the Hard Disk caddy (HP Product ID: 624572-001, Spare ID: 624879-001) is avaible at a range of prices, up to an eye-watering £80+ on Amazon – if you need a couple you’re probably better off buying a new MicroServer and using it for spares.

Originally published on April 12, 2012.

The HP ProLiant MicroServer is an entry-level server suited for the small home or office. With 4 drive bays plus a CD/DVD drive slot meaning a large storage capacity and a motherboard-mounted USB port it could be used as a NAS or even an ESXi host. I’ve recently bought two of these to add to the home lab setup.

Specifications:

Processor: 1.5Ghz Dual-Core AMD N40L Processor
2GB DDR3 Non-ECC RAM (Max 8GB)
Hard Disk: 250GB HDD included
Price: £139.99 (After £100 mail-in rebate, eBuyer.com)
External: Front power button, HDD and LAN indicators, 4x USB 2 ports.
Rear: 4x USB 2 Ports, VGA output, single gigabit LAN port.
4x Non hot-swap SATA drive bays
1x CD/DVD drive bay (empty).
Motherboard supporting RAID 0, 1.
1x PCIe 16x Slot, 1x PCIe 1x Slot.

The MicroServer was smaller than I thought it was going to be – two side-by-side would fit in a 19″ Rack mount if you had a shelf to put them on. The front has two LEDs, one for network and one for hard disk activity. The HP Logo on the front lights up blue when the server is on, while the machine is on standby the power button is orange. Four USB ports are provided on the front which is enough if for when you have to install the OS from a memory stick (no CD drive is included, although there is space for one). Two USB ports, an eSATA port, a single gigabit LAN port and a VGA output are on the back, as well as the power input, main exhaust fan and two PCI blanking plates. The front has a lockable door which provides access to the 4 SATA hot-swap bays inside. Three of the bays has the hard disk tray in empty, while the fourth holds the 250GB disk included with the server, and attached to the inside of the door (which has a fine mesh acting as a dust cover) is a small Allen key and enough screws for installing and securing 4 hard disks in the bays.

The single fan is quiet and would bearable if it was sitting on a shelf in an office – the single hard disk cannot be heard over the sound of the fan. However I expect if you were to fill all four bays with large, fast hard disks the noise would increase significantly. Other reviews have noted a poor fit with the drives within the bay causing an annoying rattle, but I have only got the one disk currently so I have not experienced this. The motherboard is mounted for easy access to the CPU and dual RAM slots – it can be slid in and out but I have not needed to try this yet.

There is also an Add-in card at around £60 which provides a basic iLO (integrated Lights-Out) remote management which contains another LAN ports and a VGA output. Maybe something for a real die-hard, but most people would be fine without it.

Good points:
- Very well built, cannot fault it at all (save for one point below)
- For the price, excellent value considering you get 2GB RAM and a hard disk with it.
- Quiet (at entry-level specs)

Bad Points:
- The trays for mounting the disks are stiff to remove, and empty they feel rather fragile. I don’t know the cost for a replacement but given the price and fact it’s not a professional SAN-level construction it’s good enough.
- Two network ports are not on the server. Again, not really that important, just a “nice to have” thing.
- The onboard RAID only supports RAID 0 and 1. When a machine can have 4 hard disks in it RAID 5 would be nice, 10 better – but most people would use software raid instead.

One final point is that while the server can have Server 2008 32-Bit installed on it, HP does not provide (obviously, anyway) any network drivers for it, so 64-bit is needed for LAN use. Just one of those small things you happen to run into.

Final words.

All in all, for this price, you really cannot fault what HP have managed to put together in this small package. Have one as a media server, have one as a home web server, have one as a backup server (after putting some more disk in it, that is) for all your documents. Hell, if you’ve got a “more than average” home network it’s well worth having. If you cannot bring yourself to needing one of the HP ML-series servers, this is a perfect machine to have. Highly recommended – congratulations, HP.