Replacement or upgrade my existing WHS hardware

[stuartmanton]

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?

 

[stuartmanton]

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

 

[stuartmanton]

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.