Is it worth continuing with my HP N40L

[sutty451]

Hi all

I have an ageing HP N40L that has had a fair amount of use over the years. I 'retired' it last year and have been relying on a 12TB MyBook for backups and media streaming. I am keen to get a NAS up and running again, primarily so Im not relying on one drive (the MyBook) to secure all my data, photos, films etc etc.
The N40L is stock, with the AMD Turion and 2GB PC3-10600E Unbuffered DDR3 ECC. I have 4x 3TB Seagate NAS drives in it.

Its main use would be backups, media server/storage for network streaming.

Is it worth upgrading the RAM (assuming you can still buy the RAM for these) and persevering with, or is it getting too old to bother with. It is/was working fine. I believe if I want to run FreeNas I will need at least 8GB RAM, will I need any other upgrades (other than a USB to run the OS).

many thanks

 

[jgreco]

The N40L will take up to 16GB of DDR3 UDIMM, despite the specs saying 8GB max. This is recommended if you can find the right UDIMM's.

The PSU's on these tend to blow out because they are somewhat undersized. There's someone on eBay that sells a better replacement.

It will not have sufficient CPU for doing Plex transcoding, if that's what you mean by "media server".

USB for boot isn't recommended.

They are quirky little boxes, with the optical bay SATA thing and the poorly-compatible iLO option issue, but if you can work with what it is capable of, it's a nice little box. We have one here that's been soaking up replication traffic for many years and it just keeps going like the Energizer bunny.

I hacked up an IBM BR10i card with IR mode to work in the PCIe x1 slot for boot and stuck a pair of SSD's in RAID1 on it. This was back in the days before ZFS.