I really like my little HP server, I picked it up a few years ago for about £140 (with some cashback) and have been using it for a load of things.
It’s got 4 bays for hard drives, all of which I’m using. One is for the boot/OS drive (though you can use a USB thumb drive if you want to use that) and the other drives are used for storage, in my case at least.
Anyway, I came into possession of a Samsung PM810 SSD the other week and thought that it would be a good little upgrade for the server – I can’t upgrade the CPU and to be honest, i’m not putting massive workloads on it, so massively increasing disk i/o would hopefully speed things up quite a bit.
Firstly I backed up all the configs I could find on the c: drive to one of the other drives so I could just copy it all back after the reinstall.
I then pulled out the first caddy (on the left when looking at the machine) and put this boot drive aside – if anything went wrong I still have a completely functional bootable c: drive ready to go.
Mounting the SSD into the caddy was easy – I didn’t. I know there are ways to do this but with the weight of a 2.5″ SSD being a few grams, the SATA connectors actually hold it in place pretty well. However I did have to remove all the other drives to get it in as it’s rather buried at the back.
I had previously been running Server 2008 R2 and wanted to upgrade to Server 2012 R2 but this caused some problems. It turns out there is a known issue with the NIC on the N40l and Server 2012. It’ll seem to install but will hang on the Detecting Devices stage after the first reboot. Apparently there is a new BIOS version to address this, but I couldn’t be bothered to potentially brick my server. As such I just moved back to Server 2008 R2.
Once this was installed it was the standard Microsoft ‘oh, you appear to have 535mb of updates’ which took overnight to finish.
I must say though that it is a lot faster, not only on boot up but in general usage.
So, overall, SSDs are good!
Be First to Comment