SoonerLater
Explorer
- Joined
- Mar 7, 2013
- Messages
- 80
In 2013 I built my first (and so far, only) FreeNAS box using an HP Proliant N40L Micro Tower. I paid $335.99 (Amazon) for the box. I installed six 1-TB drives, 16 GB of RAM and put FreeNAS on a USB flash drive that plugs into an internal (on the motherboard) USB port. Four of the drives go in removable (cold-swap) drive bay caddies. Two more are installed internally through a bit of modding. I went with RAIDZ2, so I have ~4 TB of usable space. I try to keep it below 75% of available capacity. It's been a very reliable file server.
I had planned to replace the drives after three years, but obviously I didn't follow through. Now that everything is six years old I suspect that I should replace it with a new build before something breaks. I can continue to run the 2013 box on the side, but only for non-critical stuff.
So what is on the market which is sort of, kind of, like the N40L? I'm aware of the current HP Proliant Microserver Gen10 line, but I can't tell whether the old trick of putting six drives in the box still works. I definitely want to have room for six drives. In asking what is today's N40L, I don't mean to limit the answer to just HP hardware. Any PC that has roughly the same form factor is something I would consider. I don't have room for a full size or even mid-size tower.
I had planned to replace the drives after three years, but obviously I didn't follow through. Now that everything is six years old I suspect that I should replace it with a new build before something breaks. I can continue to run the 2013 box on the side, but only for non-critical stuff.
So what is on the market which is sort of, kind of, like the N40L? I'm aware of the current HP Proliant Microserver Gen10 line, but I can't tell whether the old trick of putting six drives in the box still works. I definitely want to have room for six drives. In asking what is today's N40L, I don't mean to limit the answer to just HP hardware. Any PC that has roughly the same form factor is something I would consider. I don't have room for a full size or even mid-size tower.