Replacement or upgrade my existing WHS hardware

stuartmanton

stuartmanton

stuartmanton

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Joined
17 Jul 2006
Posts
66
About 3 years ago I put together a machine to run WHS v1 this was based around the following

Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H 785G Socket AM2+ VGA DVI HDMI Out 8 Channel Audio MATX Motherboard
AMD Sempron 140 2.7GHz
2Gb Ram

I currently have 2x1tb disks in the machine. The machine does take a while to boot and shutdown but once running seems sluggish but ok.

I am going to move to Server 2012 Essentials and was initially going to replace the machine with a HP Microserver N40L with 8Gb Ram.

Now I am thinking whether I would be better to use the money to upgrade some of the components in the existing box.The case/hard disks/PSU or all fine.

I have already build a WHS for someone based on the N36L and did like the size and build quality just not sure that the £140 would be better spent on upgrades. If so what M/B processor would be the sweat spot for performance/price/energy consumption?
 
That's my question

How will the Microserver compare in performance to my existing box as it stands?

If I spend £120-130 on new M/B/CPU and RAM for the existing box can I get any which will be significantly better performing than the Microserver
 
Perform better in what way?

On my N36L with 4GB RAM, Geforce 210 and Server 2008R2 I run XBMC, SABNzbd, Sickbeard, use as file storage, backups and this tears downs LOTS of *stuff* with never missing a beat.

In fact I have just got 2 8GB sticks with a plan to put Exchange on it as well to see how it copes and maybe run my own mail server for my family.

You are not going to get anything better for the price unless they release another, better model at the same or similar price.

And its cheap to run, and it simple to upgrade/add disks and its small and it looks good!

As you can tell I like mine, its without a doubt one of the best products to come out in a long long time.
 
What are you using the WHS for and what's important to you?

Unless you're wanting to do loads of media streaming and need more CPU power to transcode (in which case the HP N40 will be pretty poor too), then you'd probably just get away with increasing the RAM to a minimum of 4GB - spend the rest on more disks :)
 
Currently using the WHS as a NAS and backing up my desktop, laptop. I also have logitechs Media Server running to serve my music collection along with a couple of other add ins, nothing special.

I did think about virtualising it with ESXi as it would be useful to run some VMs on the server to support development but to be honest I would probably just spin these up on my more powerful desktop when I needed them.
 
Another +1 for the Microserver, it sits there, takes care of business and runs on next to nothing in the way of kwh.

Also, HarryPainful, can you link me to the RAM\model that you got and if it works or not?

Cheers
 
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