Thursday, August 11

Geek

Toy Shopping, Winter Edition, Update 2

Now is the Winter of our disk content.*

Just ordered a couple of HP servers.  I've always wanted an HP server, and now I'm getting two.

Admittedly, they're very very small HP servers:

/images/HP-Kuroneko.jpg

They take four 3.5" drives in neat little caddies, up to 8GB of ECC (or non-ECC) RAM, and are powered by an Athlon II dual-core chip.***  Gigabit ethernet, a swarm of USB ports, one each eSATA and VGA.  Two low-profile PCIe slots, one full x16 and one x1.  Comes with 1GB of ECC RAM and a 250GB disk, which isn't very much but at least lets you get it up and running right out of the box.

$250 each, including shipping - which is the same price as those Buffalo 4-disk NAS boxes, but a lot more capable.  At the same time they're a good bit bigger than a Buffalo, but at the same same time they're maybe one third the size of the mini-tower machines under my desk and reportedly very quiet and light on power.

They'll work fine as file servers or test boxes without cluttering the place up too much.

I was uncertain whether to buy them - I could revive some of my older machines to do the same duties, though they'd be larger, noisier, and more expensive to run - when I found some pretty positive reviews and a 175-page thread and another 194-page thread about them on OCAU.  They're apparently quite the item with the hobbyist crowd.

Now I just need to name them.  Kirino for one, I think.  And...  Menma?

* Sorry.**
** Not really.
*** A 1.3GHz low-power Athlon, but that should be fine for what I'll be doing with them.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at 08:09 AM | Comments (6) | Add Comment | Trackbacks (Suck)
Post contains 288 words, total size 2 kb.

1 What OS do they run?

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Thursday, August 11 2011 10:50 AM (+rSRq)

2 They come without an OS; you have to install your own.  Or at least, the budget edition I bought comes with no OS.

Officially HP supports Windows and Red Hat Linux, but people are running all sorts of things on them.  Apparently the new version of Windows Home Server works well.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 11 2011 11:51 AM (PiXy!)

3 Wow, Kirino, really? For the second one I'd go for Murasaki. You know, to continue the little brat theme in an unconventional way (Kurosaki would be too obvious).

Posted by: Pete Zaitcev at Thursday, August 11 2011 02:44 PM (9KseV)

4 My naming scheme of petite anime schoolgirl goddess eponymous leading characters from consecutive years is running kind of thin.  I have Haruhi and Yurie (eponym stretch), my first two modern PCs after four years on a Pentium 4, Nagi (after Haruhi got horribly corrupted from a bad memory chip), Tanarotte (eponym fail), and I'm planning to build Shana and possibly Lina (again, eponym fail) when Bulldozer ships.  (Only Nagi and Tanarotte are currently running, though Haruhi and Yurie still work fine.)

My notebooks are named after moeblobs - Mio for the 15" model with the gorgeous 1080p screen, Sae for the 13" subnotebook.  (And I'm eyeing an 11" subsubnotebook version of Sae that will have to be named Chika.)

Taiga is reserved for a future Mac Mini.

My NASes are named after weather fairies.  (Sugar, Pepper, Salt.)

So unless I've missed a whole lot of anime schoolgirl goddess etc etc in recent years, I'll need to forage further afield.

Posted by: Pixy Misa at Thursday, August 11 2011 04:18 PM (PiXy!)

5 Well, there's Kamichama Karin, who is both goddess and moeblob.

Posted by: Steven Den Beste at Friday, August 12 2011 12:39 AM (+rSRq)

6 Hope they work out for you.  I'm shopping for a new laptop, which I shouldn't be, about which more anon, and I keep liking the new HPs, but I don't want to get one because I shouldn't be shopping for a new laptop, because the HP dv4 I bought 18 months ago started failing after 8 months.  HP couldn't fix it after three tries over four months.  They replaced the CPU twice an the mainboard twice but it kept dying and when the warranty ran out I decided not to renew it, and it lasted another 6 months before CPU #3 gave out.

Posted by: RickC at Sunday, August 14 2011 12:06 PM (VKVOz)

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