HP Microserver N54L vs Acer EasyStore H340

Hello folks!

Recently I bought a new micro server, an HP N54L.
It is the last one of the 7th generation of microservers from HP (here you can find all the specs), after the well known and sold N36L and N40L.

I bought it because I need to expand my storage and my actual storage server (Acer EasyStore H340) is too cpu-limited to handle esternal e-sata cases.

As far I can see the HP microserver outperform the Acer microserver in every situation, even on power consumption!

I didn't do a lot of test, I simply copied the same files across the two servers to see the difference: 99 Mbyte/sec for the HP and 65 Mbyte/sec for the Acer.

I'll keep you updated!

EXT4 for large files...

Hello folks!

I love xfs because it can manage very well big file systems (24 Tbyte or more) without loss on speed or file handling but now I'm testing ext4 on a precise situation: manage files above 4 Gbyte.

If you format a partition with mkfs.ext4 with the default options it will create an inode every 16K which is good if you have a lot of small files but it is useless if you store very large files so I googled around how to optimize and I found the creation flags largefile and largefile4.


With the largefile flag the file system will have one inode each megabyte while with the largefile4 flag will have one inode each 4 megabyte which simply means to save about 2 Gbyte every 100 Gbyte of space.
The only drawback I found is the minor number of files you can store.



I'm testing ext4 with the largefile4 flag on a file system of about 16 TB (raid 5 of five 4 TB disks on a HP N54L microserver) to see  how it performs compared to my beloved xfs.

I'll keep you updated!

I know, it was a long absence

Hello World!

Sorry for my long absence but I was very busy at work plus my parents came here to spend the winter holidays  so I didn't have any sort of free time!

But I'll update the blog with a lot of news!

Cheers!