Quiet and efficient N54L replacement

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ghuber

New Member
Jun 10, 2018
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Hi,

I am currently running my N54L as a (home-)fileserver, mostly serving Kodi with HD material and running a small webserver. The server runs as a headless server on FreeBSD 11.1 with ZFS enabled (16 GB ECC RAM).

Since I have the feeling it is reaching its end of life (unexplicable hardware crashes in the past months), I am thinking about replacing it.

Performance-wise I do not think that I need a much faster machine at the moment but I sure won't mind if the "new" thing has more power than the old one.

I would like something compact, just as the HP Microserver (no tower chassis) and while it does not have to be "energy saving", it should be somewhat efficient.

Of course I could go out and buy the Gen10 HPE Microserver but I wonder if I could have a better and cheaper thing custom built, as I have been building my desktop PCs for ages and would try a server as well.

What could you recommend in terms of chassis, CPU cooler (and PSU if not included with chassis)?

I would not mind keeping my 16GB ECC DDR3 memory, but that is no deal breaker. I will use 2 SSDs and 6x6TB HGST NAS drives (that I already use on my HPE Microserver). In addition, I will continue to use my IBM M1015 HBA (flashed FW).

Currently my N54L runs in my study, so I would not mind a somewhat bearable noise level (comparable to the N54L). If that is not possioble/feasible I would need some kind of remote acces, as I would run the server in the basement alternatively.

I do not want to sspend excessively more money than on a HPE Gen10 4-core which currently retails for about EUR540/USD600.

I greatly appreciate all your suggestions and your help,

Georg