HP N54L Microserver and Ubuntu - Part three - one year on.

It's almost a year now since I installed the micro server, things are still going well.

I'm on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS until the new LTS 14.04 comes out - this should be July when the LTS users will get notification of upgrades, there's still support for many years on 12.04 LTS so I might not bother upgrading, I only upgraded last time because the LTS came to an end, not because the server was unstable or anything.

I've still got the same drive configuration (2 x 250 Gb and 1 x 1 Tb with an older IDE 500 Gb drive on the external USB) plus 4GB of memory and things run nice and smooth, the CPU isn't the worlds fastest and I knew that when purchasing it - there's little point having a high end CPU sitting idle for most of it's life, the AMD CPU fires up it's core speed to cope with the task and does so with no issues, it drops back down to 800 Mhz afterwards and idles away the hours, having something like and i5 or i7 to do the task might mean it's done a little quicker but in reality 99% of the time it's sitting there at 1% utilization so a waste of CPU power, much better to put that into a system that needs that amount of power constantly.

It's a good compromise processor though, serving books through Calibre for example shows ample CPU power, an increase in fan speed is only noticeable when I add a lot of books into the auto-add folder, it ramps up while it adds the books then idles back down, in most situations you don't need any more power.

Film and music streaming are working fine and I've not found any issues in the performance there, if anything it's the internal wireless network in the house that's not keeping up.

File sharing has never had an issue and all the shares are running great, printer sharing the same, it was interesting when I installed Windoze 8 on my Daughters other PC (it's now been removed as she declared Win 8 was sh!t), Win 8 found the linux printer and installed it without any complaints, I almost fell off my chair in disbelief.

She's since gone back to Win 7 which has also installed the linux printer with no issues but by a stroke of irony she's never powered the Win 7 PC up since the day I built it (four months ago), instead running everything on her linux laptop - what a waste of time building that ! I think part of the issue was purchasing office 2013 for her school work which was quickly declared worse than Win 8 and thankfully only £8 wasted on Office 2013 (we've just upgraded our work PC's to Office 2013 and everyone is complaining about equipment running slower, macros not working correctly and general crapness - in fairness there was little wrong with Office 2007 or 2010 and we've taken a step back with 2013).
I had my Quad core i7 notebook upgraded and it now runs worse than my old dual core 1.5 Athlon used to before - a shocking performance hit - even worse I saw almost 3 years of work grind to a halt when my Visual Basic code was crashing with errors, I had to re-write perfectly usable code simply because Office 2013 decided it was doing things differently, one macro that used to take about 1.5 minutes in Office 2010 now takes about 6 minutes, one macro that used to take 2 minutes I timed at needing about 49 hours to complete ! There's a lot of unhappiness out there with this.

I've installed psensor to monitor CPU temp etc just so I can keep an eye on things, nothing much to report here, just a standard set of outputs.
It's interesting my CPU lowest temp is 39 degrees which is 10 degrees lower than my previous CPU, that used to run at 49 degrees when idling and rise to anything around 65 degrees or more whereas this CPU has not risen above 50 degrees, so that's a vast improvement.



Android ADB is running well and I've had many phones connected whilst I'm playing around with them so that's another plus, DVD and CD burning has been fine on the HP burner - I tend to use K3B for all my tasks and the HP DVD 1260 I purchased from PC World runs like a dream.

I think the only task I need to do on the server is to power down soon and give it a quick dust out, it's a little dusty in there but I'll put that off for a bit - psensor should help on that, if I see the base temperature rise too much then it's time to get the air duster out.

For the money the server has lived up to expectations, Ubuntu 12.04 runs fine on it with no issues, the cheap USB sound card works fine for the tasks I need and although I put an external 13 port USB dongle on it's got plenty to work with.

I only put it on as I've been plugging and unplugging lots of USB pen drives, phones etc and put all my normal day to day stuff (printer, sound card, mouse, keyboard etc) on this single unit, leaving 4 front mounted USB ports and one at the rear (I keep my external USB HDD on it's own port).

So far I've not even used the E-Sata port, I might look at moving the external USB drive into an E-Sata enclosure but then again I only use it for backups so it's passing data rarely and perhaps not worth the cost ?





One difference I have noticed since installing it is it's much quieter at night, I used to hear my previous PC whirring away, this one is silent so there's a great improvement on that front.

A work colleague recently purchased a Microserver and got a 3 year on site carepack included for no more than I paid so these are still popping up on the web as a bargain.

My only thoughts for the future, I might invest in an SSD for the primary drive, it's been through the wars a bit and has done 2.7 years continuous power up, if that was a normal office drive then it would be about 9 years (counting 8 hour days) so it's done good service but with the price of SSD coming down it might be time to invest.
I have an Evo Pro 840 SSD in my laptop which is running great so I'll see if it's worth playing with one or not - at the end of the day the drive is fine, no errors, my 1 Tb drive has also done 2.4 years continuous and that's in good running order as well so things don't need changing for the sake of it.

I find the SSD in the laptop runs nice and quickly so it might be if the server drive starts to show it's age it's time to pop over to one, I'm still running 32 bit Ubuntu, it's never crashed so I've never got to a point where I needed to do a system wipe so rather than re-create all my shares and folder security options it's been simpler to keep on 32 bit and simply move the drive through all the different server boxes it's been in.

I notice Ebuyer doing a 250gb Evo 840 for about £120, slightly more if you need an upgrade kit which comes with a dongle to transfer data !

I'll just use CloneZilla if I go down this route then expand the hdd partition afterwards, it's pretty straight forwards.