HP ProLiant ML150 Gen9 review

A compact but powerful tower that’s ideal for SMBs and remote offices

IT Pro Verdict

A low starting price and plenty of room to expand makes this tower server a top choice for growing businesses

Reasons to buy
  • +

    Good internal design and expansion potential; E5-2600 v3 Xeon support; Generous storage capacity; Top value

Reasons to avoid
  • -

    Huge and confusing range of storage options

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Internal design and storage choices

Build-wise, the ML150 Gen9 is a winner as inside the solid, lockable metal chassis is a well-designed interior. All the important bits are easy to get at for upgrades, and the memory and CPU sockets are covered by a sturdy transparent plastic air shroud that's simple to remove.

For the review, HP fitted four 500GB SATA drives for us to play with but you can choose from a big selection of storage configurations although the sheer range can make it confusing. An extra four-drive cold-swap bay can be added and the server's embedded Dynamic Smart Array B140i RAID controller has a spare connector for it.

If you don't mind losing the 5.25-inch bays up above, the B140i also lets you add two more LFF SATA drives for a total of 10. If you want more, you can add HP's H240 PCI-e RAID card which supports 8 hot-swap 12Gbps SAS SFF drives - or go for a P840 card and max out at 16 drives.

Latest Videos From

For hard disks, you're spoilt for choice as HP offers a huge range of LFF and SFF drives plus SSDs. SATA, Midline-SAS and SAS are available and HP has now certified 6TB and 8TB LFF SAS helium drives for this server.

HP's embedded Active Intelligent Provisioning makes light work of OS installation

Dave Mitchell
Dave Mitchell

Dave is an IT consultant and freelance journalist specialising in hands-on reviews of computer networking products covering all market sectors from small businesses to enterprises. Founder of Binary Testing Ltd – the UK’s premier independent network testing laboratory - Dave has over 45 years of experience in the IT industry.

Dave has produced many thousands of in-depth business networking product reviews from his lab which have been reproduced globally. Writing for ITPro and its sister title, PC Pro, he covers all areas of business IT infrastructure, including servers, storage, network security, data protection, cloud, infrastructure and services.

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