Microserver to replace N54L

Waffles on 14/06/2018 - 10:39

My N54L is starting to get a bit old. I use it as a home media/file server.

Transcoding video on plex takes all its CPU which makes it struggle to do anything else.

Looking into the microserver market it sounds like the gen10 are the current but apparently pretty flawed.

So where should I be looking for something that can run an OS like windows/Linux and can take 4/5 SATA HDDs?

I feel like the N54L was about 300$ so ideally aiming for that price point. If it could play Minecraft as a bit of a hacky second PC for the kids that'd be a win too.

Computing HP Microserver

Comments

  • RedHab on 14/06/2018 - 12:05

    Me too: My N36L still works fine as a file server, and can play h265 at 4k thanks to a GT 1030, but it is a bit aged. I'd be interested to see others' replies.

    • Indomietable on 14/06/2018 - 15:07

      You can easily offload h265 decoding to hardware which most player do but when you run plex as a server it need to encode - and most h265 encoding are done in CPU - with little hardware support.

  • psy on 14/06/2018 - 13:27

    I replaced by N54L with a Gen8, with Xeon.

    Not quite $300, but my use case (esxi) is rather different

  • Indomietable on 14/06/2018 - 15:00

    N54L was never really designed as a compute node. I'd say keep it as storage only server and add another server to run your plex. You can get i5 NUC that has CEC as plex server + plex player.

    • Ausbob on 20/06/2018 - 13:48

      The price of a NUC i5 easily goes over 300 last I checked (over a year ago?), with ram, ssd no chance :/

      Needing an auxiliary Nas/bay or crazy high non redundant ssd internal storage may be a pain too

  • kipps on 14/06/2018 - 22:49
    +1

    I upgraded from an N36L to ML10v2. Unfortunately it’s getting quite hard to source them now. I would probably custom build if I needed another.

    Also rather than Windows/Linux have a look at FreeNAS. ZFS gives you better ability to recover from errors.

  • sane on 15/06/2018 - 09:32

    Well first I tend to transcode in slow time, so the format stored is one that can readily be played anywhere.

    However if you really want to upgrade (and I guess I'll have to sometime) then a cheap board in a cheap case, with a lower power Ryzen chip and a SATA hotdock seems appropriate. That way you can upgrade as needed.

  • G Wok on 23/07/2018 - 00:54

    I'm wondering about this also. My N54L is still going strong for storage running 6 HD's in the optical drive slots.

    Any other microservers that can run xpenology and be modified to fit extra drives? The Gen 10 can maybe only fit 1 more 2.5" drive.

  • uccoffee on 06/01/2019 - 14:57

    my 2nd power supply (N36L, N40L ) die since 2011 …. so upset
    what to do now

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