Monkeh16 & Nick --

Please take your discussion elsewhere. This is not meant to be an OS discussion, and you respective positions have been very clear for several posts to everyone following this thread.

I saw that there are now newer and more silent fans.
It there anyone who replace the original fan with an Noiseblocker eloop ?

Thanks

" This requires a very small screwdriver to unlock the conductor pins from the connector and swap them around to the desired slots"

What does it mean 'unlock'? Can someone explain a little more? Got this fan but have no idea how to start?

Thx

Examine the connector closely, and you'll see that each of the 4 metal pins have a little protrusion that clips into a hole in the plastic rectangular housing. That's what locks it in place. There are 4 of these little square-ish holes on one side of the connector. Push against the metal visible in one of these holes while pulling gently on the wire that the pin is connected to (this is what you need a tiny screwdriver for). This will unlock the pin and it will slide out easily.

Thx Mike, got it!

You guys should review an ML110, G7.

The E3's in these things are really impressive stuff. Really bloody powerful, and really efficient. Supposedly an 'Entry level server', but these things fly.

"The server is also easy on power consumption with our in-line power meter clocking the review system at only 35W with Windows Server 2008 R2 in idle. With the SiSoft Sandra benchmarking application exercising the eight logical cores of the Xeon E3 processor this peaked at only 97W.
"

Your MicroServer article suggest an idle power usage of 37W. Given that idle time is most of the time, the ML110 would easily match the micro server on total power usage.

The one I have is quiet, she only revs up when worked. Moderate amount of vibration though. Probably cheap HDD's. I don't think vertical mounts help.

The ML110 is rather nice but also costs more than twice as much as the MicroServer. It is also much larger.

Does this site not cover efficient/quiet performance and feature orientated machines?

Servers are not typical consumer products. If HP was eager to have one reviewed & sent us one to review, we would not say no, but it's not something we normally seek out. The Microserver is a unique exception in many ways.

Cool. When I have some cash, I look forward to digging further around this site.

Cheers.

Thank you for the review Mike. Most particularly, thank you for the fan mod information. I have the faster N40L model of this microserver at home, and have had it for over a year now. I love it, my only complaint is the noise level being a bit high. I had suspected the small fan on the power supply. Now I have guidance on curing this.

A few extra things that might help: For those that will run FreeNAS; that OS boots off a USB stick, and there is an internal USB socket right at the front of the motherboard. That means this stick is inside the locked front cover, out of harm's way, and away from tampering. I have run mine up with a 4TB Hitachi drive. Not that I would recommend that drive. It was installed as an experiment, as it was going into a different machine. But they work. I only run the listed maximum of 8GB memory, but apparently they will support 16GB - at least.

For those who want to use these machines in a business setting, and a friend of mine does (the even later N54L), I suggest the Remote Management board - web access to the machine is much more than a useful addition. If you do add one, note that the normal VGA outlet is replaced by the one on that card - this caught him out. That HP also offer on-site support contracts (well they do here in Australia), is another huge benefit.

Hi,

Thanks for the article and information on swapping the connector pins for replacing the fan.

I tried an Akasa Apache fan as suggested by other posters in this thread but my MicroServer N54L refused to boot claiming the fan was missing.

I booted into the BIOS with the original fan in place and navigated to the fan speed page (it was spinning at 900+ RPM). I then did a fast hot swap of the fans to install the pin-modded Akasa Apache and I found the BIOS was reporting a speed below 500 RPM, at around 490 RPM.

The Apache spec states the minimum speed is 600 RPM, and mine may be a duff one, but I thought people may be interested in knowing that this fan may not be suitable.

On the other hand if anyone has any ideas where I may have gone wrong I'd be interested to hear (I'm pretty sure I got the pin swap correct, I double and triple checked).

Edit 1.7.13:
I have now installed a Coolink SWiF2-120P and this works fine in my N54L.

Any other ideas on fan models that can be used as replacements? The Scythe fan (SY1225SL12HPVC) seems to be discontinued and it could be a bother to find around these parts. Should I order one before stock is completely depleted?

Also, I read a blog entry somewhere (http://ireckon.net/2013/03/the-n40l-nas ... ck-duoswap) claiming that you could just use a normal non-pwm fan forget about matching pwm fans? Any truth to that?

I used Enermax Cluster when i had mine, and yes, i tried 3-pin fans too, they work fine, but they need to run above 500RPM.

my hp microserver gen8 has a 5 wire configuration for the case fan connector >< i bought a 3 pin scythe fan rated at a constant 1900rpm coz i figured that the 30% setting would still keep rpm >500.

Fail!

Does anyone know if this is because the fourth pin was missing? or if it is simply because the fan was not sufficient to meet the needs of the bios settings?

Cheers

We've just started to explore the issue of how to deal with the too-fast fan in our Gen8 sample. That 6-pin, 5-wire plug is a total PITA, but it's basically a modified 4-pin PWM, with 2 ground wires. The reason your fan didn't work is that it needs to be a PWM fan.

AFAIK, the color coding used by HP is the same as in the original Microserver, and the fan mod page of my article whose the key between HPs and standard 4-pin wiring. So get a standard 4-pin PWM fan (max 2000rpm, I'd say) and try pin-matching. Getting a fan plug of the type HP uses could be a pain.

No idea why HP made this so complicated!