Hp Microserver N36l

[Kristeen Cheek]

LikesVery lower power. Very Quiet (21dB). Compact. Very cheap. Well designed and constructed. Easy to swap out drives. Slide out motherboard tray. IPMI card option. A screwdriver (which fits all screws in the system) and drive screws are held in place in the front door!

Dislikes: You can almost fit another 3.5" drive in the top part of the chassis, but not quite! Plastic parts of coldswap bays feel a little flimsy, but these should be easily user-replaceable if they do break. 250GB drive is a waste of money. They shouldn't have bothered including it.

It's easy to fit a 2.5" drive below the 5.25" bay. Viola! 6th drive! I chose this to be the cache drive, so I don't have to worry if the eSATA cable accidentally gets pulled out of the back at some point:

The eSATA to SATA cable is a bit thick and long, but there's plenty of room in the case to accomodate it. I have a thinner cable somewhere (I do not have Cable OCD ) so when I find that, I may replace the current one.

I have an Intel P4 2.8ghz machine I use for daily torrents and what not. I was compairing the specs and this thing blows it out of the water and appears that it would run a lot quiter and I'm sure it would put out a lot less heat.

Before I go buying all the bits I wondered if somebody could give me a bit of advice, it is basically going to be used as my HD movie storage server, I don't have a streamer yet but will probably be a PCH or similar but obviously this will not allow me to rip the blus from it, what is the best way to get a bdd to rip to the server without using up one of my drive spaces from on the microserver as the disc space is going to be important?

I received my server today (US) and the order was in no small part due to members on this forum giving this little box good reviews. I'm sure I'll be referring to this thread over the next couple of weeks or so as I build out the machine.

My second option was to go down the AMD chipset route instead (and a slight increase in DDR). This is the HD5450 chipset and manufactured by Sapphire which fits nicely inside the case. There are other manufacturers however Sapphire seemed to be fairly cheap and included a smaller heatsink (rather than fan) that other brands offer.

Hope all goes well, I would recommend looking at the Nvidia cards, this is the first ATI card I have owned and find the interface and graphics functions not as slick. Unfortuately your limited by choice as most are not low profile cards.

Hi, I took your recomendation and installed the HD 5450 but even though, I am getting the display via the VGA connection on it I am having problems installing the driver. I have got the latest from the Saphire site and the install goes through fine with no errors but its still showing it as the default VGA driver. I am currently running on Win 2008 R2, (the WHS 2011 vail beta) I tried both the Win 7 and XP drivers, no change. Any suggestions would be helpful. Thanks

Yes the ATI graphics cards include HDMI audio output. The ATI graphics card decodes audio using the ATI catalyst drivers therefore an additional audio card is not required. From my knowledge you will not find a graphics card that includes an optical output (only HDMI audio out). If you specifically require audio output using an optical cable (to an optical input on your amp) then you will require an additional card.

anyone got any issues with heat? i have had the n36l for 8 months now, i bought it when it first went on offer. decided to start playing about with it a bit more and thought the hd 5450 was the most popular choice.

I want to use my HP Proliant as an HTPC to use with my HP LP3065 monitor. So I need a way to get both video *and* audio out of the HP Proliant which would be fine is I used HDMI, however the monitor *only* has dual-link DVI connectors!

I have a HP Proliant N36L microserver and am trying to install Windows Server 2008 R2. I cannot get the install to recognise the disks - it needs a driver set for the SB7xx/SB8xx chipset RAID. All I can find on the AMD site is a download for Windows 7 and they don't work - possibly as they are not WQHL signed. The link on HP's site points to an AMD Dev site which needs a login and won't let me create one

Found a HP Support site that has AMD RAID Drivers to download for WIndows Server 2008 R2. Don't know if you tried this link before or not: Drivers & Software - HPE Support Center. (Copied website from link):

Best thing to do is open a EMAIL SUPPORT TICKET with AMD Support so that they can give access to that site or give a link to be able to download the latest RAID Drivers from AMD. Here is the link for the Email support (they will assign someone to help you with this problems, Hopefully): Email Form .

Yes, that's the roadblock I ran into when trying to follow the link from HPE's site. Thanks for your suggestion of using the support request from, I have followed up on that and will update back here on progress / results as and when...

Just to update as promised: the support request paid off and the team were able to supply me a link to download the correct drivers. The link was a temporary FTP one so there's no point in my posting it, so I suggest anyone else looking for the drivers makes the same request in the support form. If all else fails PM me and I'll happily put them up on my FTP server and provide a login to download them.

About a month ago I ordered a [HP Proliant N36L][hpn36l], commonly known as the HP Microserver. I had been looking to replace my aging P3-900mhz Gateway and all-round utility server for quite some time, and when I saw this on special for only $200, I knew this was going to be the perfect replacement.

With the ability for it to have the system boot off an Internal USB device, being able to take up to 8GB of DDR3 RAM, and have 8TB of hard drive space, it will be able to meet the requirements of the current box, and add on a few new abilities in the process.

While I have been waiting for it to arrive, I figured that this would be a good opportunity to do a few guides about the configuration of the machine, both at a Hardware and Software level, and be able to provide a few guides to virtualisation.

So in the next few days (possibly the weekend), I will kick off with the first article on this series.If you have any suggestions of things you would like to see done with this box, [drop us a line via twitter][contact], and I'll try and give it a go for you.

Today is a sad day where I mourn the passing of my HP N36L Microserver power supply. It lead a solid life, providing for its child components since launch, running 24/7 every day, through the cold of winter, to the scorching heat of summer, until finally it could take no more.

As with any specialised power supply it is hard to get replacements. .however as long as you are prepared to run your microserver on DC .. the board can be run on a pico power supply.. these cost around $20. Completely silent of course..

Of course you can also use any ATX supply as long as it lives outside the case and you need to add a fan.. but if you are smart you can use the old power shell, to do a lot of this and so all you have outside is a nice 12v supply.. beautiful ones.. old xbox.. absolutely fantastic supply.

Well too late now, but I RMA'ed my original PSU due to excessive sounds when it was within warranty. A new one arrived in a few days and I was told I could keep the old one. So now I have a spare, which I fixed with a better fan :)

LOL.. they might get suspicious if there is a sudden influx of warranty demands on HP server power supplies from whirlpool users.. maybe they will start demanding the return and testing before replacement.. !!

Thanks for the suggestions.

Unfortunately my NAS runs a lot of things for me, not just storage (Plex, torrents, SAB, sickbeard, SSH tunnels) and provides the only entry into my home network via SSH tunnel so I couldn't really wait for a PSU to be delivered in a week or so. Plus rather than having to carry around USBs with any training material I want to use at work, I simply stream it, as well as music if I need it.

I ended up with an off the shelf modular corsair 430W PSU which is just sitting on top with the cables run inside the case and all good. Noise and passive cooling aren't a requirement for me for this system.

Pico PSU definitely works in the Microserver.

The connector of the Pico is smaller than the power connector of the stock PSU.

Therefore make sure you plug it to the correct side of the mobo connector.

In a similar situation here and looking at the PicoPSU option. What would be the minimum wattage for a N36L Microserver running Win7, the stock 250GB HDD as well as 2 x WD Green 2TB and 2 x WD Green 1.5TB? Not using it for any real processor intensive applications. Just mainly as a file server. Would the 120 do or should I go for a 150-160? Thanks, Dan

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