[rwg]

I have an HP MicroServer N40L that I bought several years ago, and it's almost a doorstop now. Its CPU (dual-core 1.5 GHz AMD Turion II Neo) is slow and doesn't support AES-NI. It maxes out at 8 GB of RAM (16 GB of RAM if the stars align and it likes the RAM you bought). It has one GigE port, and SATA ports are limited to 3 Gbps (SATA II). Expansion is limited to an eSATA port, USB 2.0 ports, a low-profile PCIe 2.0 x1 slot, and a low-profile PCIe 2.0 x16 slot.

It's okay as a NAS that mostly sits idle and occasionally serves up unencrypted data at GigE speeds or less. For more demanding tasks, it's woefully underpowered.

[guitarbill]

I have one of those. Finding the RAM is pretty easy, I'm running 16GiB of ECC RAM. Cheap, too, because DDR2 if I remember. You can put a NIC in the PCIe slot. The SATA ports are fine for spinning disks. You can use the drive bay which is also SATA.

Of course it always depends on the use-case, but for most people at home it's sufficient. I use it as a Minecraft and media server.

[fb03]

That'd be adequate for a simple nas (samba/dav) and maybe running a 24/7 torrent client with a simple web interface but that's it, yeah.

Still, a box is a box :P

[lightedman]

Underpowered? With that much hardware I could run 32 Q3 and UT99 servers at once without blinking.