[Official] HP 290-p0043w Owner's Thread

SMBUS pins might need to be taped off to not make connection. I had to do that for my HP OEM Mellanox dual port 40G fiber cards in my 290’s that I installed them in. One wouldnt boot at all and the other only would show half the memory until I taped the pins

Proxmox UEFI fail…anyone know how to deal with this? (Besides disabling UEFI / enabling legacy boot)

Tried flashing with both Etcher and Rufus in DD mode as Proxmox instructions recommends.

No problem with booting Ubuntu installer image In UEFI mode when flashed with Etcher…

(Upgraded cpu i5 9400 and 16 go ram, sat through all of the windows and hp support assistant upgrades so uefi/bios version is current)

Would appreciate any help!

Thanks

Proxmox does not currently support secure boot. You can still boot in UEFI mode, but you will need to disable secure boot in the UEFI configuration first. It’s been a while since I did it so I don’t remember the exact steps, but I believe it involves choosing the option to disable secure boot, rebooting and then when the system reboots you have to type in a 4 digit code to fully disable secure boot.

As for Ubuntu, they have a secure boot UEFI shim that was signed by Microsoft, so it will pass the security checks.

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Ah no wonder Ubuntu works. I’ll check it out your lead here and post the steps for anyone else in future.
Thanks!

Yep this was exactly it. Thanks!

Thanks for this thread. I already have some ubiquiti equipment and was considering the UXG pro gateway until it actually released and I saw the specs. Hard pill to swallow for the money so I started looking into pfsense and found this thread. I got the hp 290 build up and running last weekend and couldn’t be happier.

I’d considered getting another for an unraid/plex device but will likely go with one of the nas killer builds.

Thanks again @JDM_WAAAT

Plutoker,

I came to the same conclusion that you did after seeing the inflated prices on the hp 290 on ebay recently. Will eventually build a box for OPNsense and am actually looking at parts and equipment to upgrade my old Phenom NAS. Just received an ebay buy, an HP Deskpro 600 G4 mini pc (roughly 7inx7inx1.4in in size) with gigabit ethernet, usb3.1 type c in front, several usb3.0 type a slots, 16gb RAM (upgradeable to 32GB via the free SODIMM slot), i5-8500T proc (shows it can be upgraded to an i7 later), 128gb nvme (with another nvme slot free), and one more free slot for an M.2 sata (will add a 1TB Samsung EVO 860 later). Seller accepted OBO of $170 since the front usb3 type A port was damaged badly (disbled that port in the Bios to prevent a short). This will be my dedicated media box that’ll also run a couple of containers and be fed data by the NAS.

Aslo, in the process, as you stated, of building a nas killer for a few bucks more than the hp 290. Currently looking at equipment and parts to replace an old AMD Phenom acting as my current NAS. Man, thanks to this place my bank account is def seeing a drain, so thanks for that! Seriously, I really appreciate all the time and effort placed into the guides and the friendliness and willing-to-help attitude of this forum! I’m new to this forum and have yet to discover the discord area, though I’ve heard alot of positives about the real-time help there.

Thanks, Live Pono

Has anyone upgraded the CPU beyond an i3-9100? I saw an i5-8400 in an earlier post here and Userbenchmarks shows some tests with an i7-8700. Curious if it’s worth upgrading to a 9th gen i7 or i5.

I’m maxing the G4900 during NZB unpacks and repairs. Something with 4-6 cores would be nice over the 2 the 4900 has.

I put an i5-9400 in mine since I’m using it as a Nas with an external jbod I built and have several LXD containers running on it too. Working perfectly fine with it.

Hey guys,

so I do have a combo setup running my dockers and Unraid and I was lucky to get an HP290 to run my Plex when it was cheap. I have upgraded the 290 with Nvme and Ram. So now I’m thinking maybe I can sell the HP and instead add a GPU to the server build, I don’t have more than 10 transcode at the same time ever so I have seen I can get a “GTX 1050 ti” to do more than that.

  • Any thoughts on the power usage of GPU vs the HP290?
  • Any advantages using GPU instead of the 290?

Thanks everyone!

here is my combo:

Has anyone swapped out the 8-pin power connector to something that would use all pins before splitting? I’m looking at adding a 4-port SATA card and need to grab power (mostly low-power consumption SSDs). Seems cleaner to use something like this

…to split the SATA power off of, but I’m having a hard time finding one with a connector that matches.

There’s currently a stock HP connector on eBay for comparison:

[Edit: 99.7% sure those connectors don’t match. Would love to hear whether anyone has found one that does]

Or am I overthinking it, and powering 4-6 total drives by splitting off the stock connector is no big deal?

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Can you please elaborate on the jbod enclosure you built?

I used an Silverstone ds380b. Just added a 450w sfx psu and sff-8088 to sff-8087 pass through adapter. Plus changed the case fans to noctua fans. I have an 9207-8e sas hba in the 290 that’s connected externally to the sff-8088 ports in the Silverstone. Using 8x8TB drives in raidz2.

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@cobalt which mini-itx motherboard and psu did you use in the Silverstone? Sounds great.

No motherboard. No need for one. The psu was an evga sfx 450w supernova GM.

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what bios are you using for the 9400? thinking about upgrading to the 8400/9400 and turning mine into a proxmox/ubuntu server as well.

Since @LivePono reached out and was curious about my build here is a few photos of what I did with the HP 290 and Silverstone DS380B

I’m running 8x8TB shucked WD drives in the Silverstone in ZFS RAIDZ2 with Ubuntu 20.04 installed to an 1TB M.2 drive in the HP 290. There’s also 2x Samsung 860 EVO’s in a ZFS Mirror acting as the storage backend for LXD. The HP 290 was upgraded to an Intel I5-9400 and has a full 32GB of DDR4 2666 RAM.

This is running the following perfectly fine in various LXD containers:

  • Plex
  • Ombi
  • Radarr
  • Sonarr
  • Jackett
  • Unpackerr (better than rutorrents auto unpack)
  • rtorrent/rutorrent
  • Tautulli
  • grafana
  • prometheus
  • varken



Used a blank I/O shield from Supermicro to cover the empty I/O due to lack of motherboard in the Silverstone.

SAS HBA with Noctua 40x20MM fan mod. Connected to the CPU fan header with a Y cable since Noctua is awesome and includes one with every fan.

Spare SAS HBA with the fan mod so it’s easier to see without having to remove the one currently in use from the 290



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Nice!

BIOS Revision/Date: 843F vF.31 05/27/2019

Did the HP Support Tool updates and waited Rebooted and waited some more etc through tons of Windows 10 updates first as a precaution, and that bios got installed with everything else, if I remember correctly.

Upgraded the hardware, including different hard drive , ran the same 2 update tools in windows again in case of something else I don’t know about that’d get updated on the hardware level support firmware, then finally installed Proxmox and everything works really well.

Very low power consumption is nice

Yeah several people have. Just search within topic for cpu upgrade etc.
I decided to do that after seeing posts with successes here from some of those users…you can put in up to 32gb ram with i5 9400 I believe…