It's been bought!

My EX490 shed a tear today. My new Gen 8 Microserver has been ordered.

It was a bit of a long road for my EX490. I got it back in April 2010, as a replacement for my HTPC, which was also acting as our family file server. In that time, it's had a few replacement hard drives, a major heart transplant this year (upgraded the Celeron to a Core 2 Duo E7500) and a major OS transplant (replaced WHS with Ubuntu 14.04).

Unfortunaly with the replacement of the OS with Ubuntu, I lost my drive pooling along with it. Drive pooling was a wonderful idea, but hasn't been implemented at an OS level like that again. There are replacement technologies (Greyhole springs to mind) but nothing that tied into the OS like Drive Pooling did.

When I hit the web to search for a replacement for the EX490, the Gen8 seemed like the natural successor. Given I was happy with the reliability of the EX490, I was happy to stick with HP, rather than BYO setup.

On this basis, and the great group of people at www.homeservershow.com providing insights and peer support, I pulled the trigger.

What I bought

Here's what I bought, the price I paid, and the reasoning behind it:

HP Gen 8 Microserver G1610T -  AU$465.00

The base Celeron seems to be on par with the E7500 in the current server, which I know handles my plex streaming requirements well, and down the track if it starts to fall behind, I can update the CPU to something beefier if needed.

Passmark comparison from https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare.php?cmp[]=947&cmp[]=2075

 As you can see, while the single thread performance is down slightly (just over 20 points), the multicore performance is a bit better. Overall, I'm fully expecting this to perform on par with what I have at the moment. When performance starts to wain, I'll splurge on a 2nd hand Xeon e3-16x0v2, which will give me a good performance boost when I need it.

HP PS1810-8G Gigabit Ethernet Manageable Switch - $79

Sitting next to my server currently is a small Cisco 5 port Gb switch. It's not managed, but it does the job of hooking in my gear.

D6300 Router -> Cisco 5 port switch
Switch -> Xbox one, Server, Smart TV, Apple TV
Wireless -> Imac (n), Surface pro (ac), 2 x iPhone 6 (ac), PS3 (g), Chromecast (n) Ipad 3rd gen (n)

I'm not super happy with how many devices are hanging off the wireless, so the new switch will allow me to have everything I currently have connected, plus 3 more connections, being the iMac, the PS3, and the 2nd NIC in the Mediasmart server. I plan on using link aggregation for this, and I'll have a separate post on how this is set up as I do it.

4 x Western Digital RED 3TB Drives - $155 Each

I chose the Western Digitals based on both personal experience, and some light reading of the home server show forums. Even though these are 5400RPM drives, I'm not too concerned about data transfer speeds. The hardest these will work will be streaming 2 movies at once, which these will handle easily.
At this stage of the build, I'm still not 100% sold on how I will configure these. I'm torn between a RAID10 with the B120i controller, or a Raid5/RaidZ managed in the OS. I'll have a post on this later as well.

Samsung 850 Pro 128Gb SSD - $139

The SSD will be the boot drive for the OS. I chose the samsung on Anandtech's recommendation around warranty, speed etc. I could have gone with a mechanical harddrive for much less, but I chose to splurge on this a bit for the speed.

2 x Kingston 8GB DDR3 1600MHz ECC DIMM Memory KVR16LE11/8I - $125 each

I've ordered 16Gb of RAM for the server as well, in anticipation of using ZFS and RaidZ (which is a ram hog.) The key here is to get ECC Ram that is not Buffered, as this will cause issues with the Gen 8. Refer to here for some examples and discussion of what ram to use.

What will it run?

I'm not sure yet!

It's boiled down to 3 options, each with their pros and cons:

Freenas
Pros
Does everything I need on a day to day basis (storage, plex, sabnzb, sickbeard and AFP support for Timemachine backups from the mac
Supports RaidZ if I use that
Easy to manage
Lightweight
Cons
It won't do much more than it was designed to do.
Won't use the SSD for anything really, as it installs on a USB drive.

Linux (namely Ubuntu Server)
Pros
Proven to meet my needs (using it at the moment)
Isn't limited to file sharing stuff (I can compile some android roms etc if I want to)

Does everything I need on a day to day basis (storage, plex, sabnzb, sickbeard and AFP support for Timemachine backups from the mac
Supports RaidZ if I use that
Powerful remote management (SSH, Webmin, VNC if needed)
Cons
Not as lightweight as Freenas
Driver support for the Gen8 might be an issue (I've read conflicting reports on this)
Not real "wife friendly" if she needs to do something to the server (which isn't very often)

Windows Server Essentials 2012 R2
Pros
Great HP intergrations (drivers, apps etc)
Easy to manage (remote desktop)
Cons
Cost (compared to the other options)
No Time Machine support (without a hacky virtual solution)
No ZFS support (aparently Storage Spaces is to be avoided)
Heavier on resources

Based on the above, I'm really leaning towards Ubuntu again. Given that I know what I'm dealing with, I can configure it how I want, and it's free, it's hard to go past.

When everything arrives, I'll keep you posted!