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. ;-)