A few months ago, that little box I’ve mentioned a few times broke down.
I took the mirrored drives out and put them into another old PC, and it came right up like magic! Terrific!
However, that old PC isn’t a good long-term replacement. It is noisy, and even with everything non-essential stripped out of it, it is power hungry. Since I pressed it into action as a server, I’ve been mulling the idea of building another Shuttle box to replace it.
Then, I noticed the HP Proliant N40L on sale for $259 at NewEgg during their Black Friday sale (which lasted until Tuesday, and now sells for $319.99.) and snapped it up.
Maybe it’s not the best server in the world, but it costs less than a cheap Shuttle-based box and suits my needs better. You could argue the CPU is a bit wimpy, but my old CPU was low-end, much older, but still more than fast enough for what I needed.
My old Shuttle box could hold only two hard drives and I had to take it apart to get to them. The new server supports four easily-pluggable drives. Maybe they’re not hot-pluggable, but I can live without constant uptime. If I have to take the machine down for a few minutes to change a drive, that’s fine.
Also, it ships with only 2GB of RAM. This is fine too. The Shuttle box was fine with only 1GB and the current temporary machine has 2GB. The Ubuntu install fits well within those sizes. Even if I needed extra memory, upgrading it would not be costly.
Finally, Silent PC Review took a look at this server and it should be much quieter and more efficient than the old PC holding down the fort now.
It has arrived and I opened it only to peek at the manual. My hope is to pop the drives into this machine and have everything work as before. I’m going to attempt this over weekend and will update the blog then.
(I know the whole Internet will be waiting breathlessly until then!)
