Hello everyone,
I wanted to see if I could collect some more knowledge about the intricacies of the HP Microserver Gen8 (the little server that could and still can). I have 3 of those and just recently wrote together some information that you can’t really find anywhere online. A lot of information has been lost when homeservershow was shut down, especially any information about a BIOS hack for more RAM. Although I believe that that was for the N54L and not the Gen8, there have been legends of people running 32GB RAM.
I already wrote down everything I know here: https://dennis.schmalacker.cloud/posts/hp-microserver-gen8-peculiarities/ but I would love to find some more if there are any, since there is also no wiki for the Microserver Gen8 anywhere.
Some notable mentiones:
Upgrade the iLO
There is a bug that will render your iLO NAND unsuable, this was fixed and you should be good with the newest iLO.
SATA Speeds of the onboard HBA/RAID chip.
The onboard SATA/RAID Controller B120i only supports two SATA6 (Bay 1&2) and two SATA3 (Bay 3&4), so speeds will be accordingly. You could choose to get a cheap used HBA and put it into the PCIe, to increase to 4 or more SATA6 ports for maximum speed.
You can put a drive into the ODD but you can’t boot off of it…
…at least not with workarounds. One is to put a USB Stick or a SD Card into the motherboard slots and boot off of that (put your GRUB bootloader on there and then boot from the ODD Port.) or create a single disk array in the Smart Array Manager, then you can also boot from the ODD Port.
Some other things I always wondered:
- Were the colored doors ever available? I would love to have a colored (red, blue, black) door for my Gen8 but there are nowhere to be found. They seem to be a gift of the HP salesmen back in the days.
Let me know what you know about Microserver that I maybe missed and what mods you have, so I can maybe write it down, because I believe the Gen 8 still has a few good years ahead of it before going to the eWaste.
P.S. I have a dream that one day, someone will come around and create a upgrade motherboard that we can just replace (with a newer CPU and newer RAM), but I know that would be pretty expensive and probably unfeasable. Either way, hope dies last.
P.P.S: I am looking for a Electrical Engineer with experience in PCB creation. ;-)
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The bios you refer to was for the earlier N series, pretty much everything you need to know about that series can be found in my very old post here
The Gen 8 will only take 16GB RAM, I think from distant memory this was a CPU limitation, cpu supported 32GB but that’s across 4 slots.
Good to capture this stuff on the Gen 8 though, thanks!
do you know if the Microserver Gen8 support 2 slot gpu?
im looking to upgrade my current gpu (p400) to an intel Arc a310 LP.
You will probably bump into the Power Cabling with the height of the card.
I have a Gen8 MicroServer running Proxmox Backup Server in an off-site location. It’s brilliant for that role, I’ve no reason to replace it until it actually dies.
A lot of information has been lost when homeservershow was shut down
It should all still be available in the Internet Archive:
You can fit another 4x 15mm SSDs on the top.
