My old faithful HP N40L just died. I had a second one in the cupboard I haven't used in years, so swapped it over... and after 24 hours it died in exactly the same way (network responds, but machine won't POST).
They sure were a little diamond in the rough. The later generations were the better part of $2k.
Might just replace it with a white box. NAS are very expensive for what they are.
RIP microservers. Mine is still hanging on... just.
In the same boat, I think I got mine originally for ~$300. The current versions are ~$2K!!!
Am thinking of moving to an 8 bay synology NAS to replace it when it gives up the ghost. Agree with you re the price of NAS. Not a lot going on inside them, no idea why they have to be so expensive.
I ditched my microserver a while back and went in Synology, you pay a decent price but, there is some nice things that come with their ecosystem, and I'm tired and sick of full maintenance of other styles servers and this suits my needs, also 160odd terabytes of storage running live with minimal electricity draw is nice!
I just bought a cheap white box to get things moving.... And TIL that if you have 4 x SATA ports on a motherboard, but actually try to use them at the same time as the onboard M2 SATA slot.... it will disable one of those 4 x SATA ports.
My HTPC is a white box too, but uses a dedicated SATA card for 8 x 3.5" HDDs, leaving the onboard stuff for the M2 and a second SSD for cache.
Off to Amazon to buy the cheapest China spec controller I can lol.