HP Microserver went BANG :(

TrueNAS General
1

Morning all,

I’ve had an HP microserver for a number of years (4x bay SATA) with 4 drives in, with external USB bootable stick with freeNAS on it (yes the predecessor to trueNAS).

I can’t recall the version of freeNAS I’m running at the moment… why? Well late last night the server went CRACK, BANG and it now wont switch on at all…

I think it could probably have fried the voltage regulator chip - that aside you can no longer buy these mini servers.

So… what can I do? Ideally I need to replace the enclosure and hope to hell the drives are ok (again I’ve no way to really check this at the moment but am assuming the CRACK, BANG has saved the rest of the machine!!)

I’ve read several forums and it seems to be a case of two or three options:

  1. build my own machine - I’m not opposed to this but I need to keep the costs as low as possible. The microserver cost me a grand total of £100 back in the day as the firm I bought it from were offering £100 off, and then HP were offering a further £100 off as a special deal - I couldn’t buy one fast enough!!
  2. Buy a pre-made NAS enclosure - thinking something like TERRAMASTER, QNAP or SYNOLOGY for this - if so can people make a recommendation - note it MUST be capable of booting off the USB stick I have which currently runs freeNAS.
  3. fix the microserver - I’m a lot more cautious about this. While I think it could be the voltage regulator that will have taken the initial hit, it could be the PSU or could be … something else. Without taking it apart I’ve no way to know, also I no longer have a multimeter, soldering iron or even solder with which to try and make repairs, assuming its something easy…

Any help / guidance appreciated. I do know this is going to take some time to resolve.

1 Like
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To keep costs as low as possible, go for any refurbished PC you can find which can host your four HDDs. (Likely no ECC tough.)

For a self build, I suppose the base recipe would be a Gigabyte MJ11-EC1 (from ram-koenig.de) with cheap second-hand DDR4 RDIMM and your choice of case and PSU.
Forget about easily booting FreeNAS on a pre-build Synology or QNAP unit—and these are not cheap.
And if the server actually went out with a “CRACK!” and a “BANG!” I would not entertain the idea of fixing it.

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Yes, I started taking the server apart. Because its a micro one, everything is smaller / tucked away. The PSU is right at the back corner of the box, meaning I’d have to strip the whole thing to pieces just to get to it and no guarantee that replacing it would actually fix the problem.

So yes, I’m now in the need something else category.

4

Well, the good news is your data should be fine.

One very good option, but perhaps not cheap, would be to buy a TrueNAS mini that supports 5 bays.

ASUSstor provide videos on how to install TrueNAS on some of their NAS boxes.

But the cheap option is to find any cheap (used) pc that you can squeeze 4 drives into.