Hi Spy Alelo
Can I pick your brains on options please? I have an N54L which I bought new in about 2013, and aside from adding RAM it's pretty much as it came out of the box (I did run OMV off a USB stick originally, but now using a 120GB SSD with OMV6). It's mainly used as a media server, but also to backup a desktop and couple of laptops. At times it's struggled with 4k content, but suspect that's as much a network issue as a data handling one! At the moment it's working fine.
I've hit 85% capacity with my 4x3TB WD Reds in RAID5, so have begun the process of migrating to new 6TB WD Red Plus drives (3rd one currently rebuilding the RAID as I type) but what's got my attention now is that the hardware is clearly getting quite old and although no failures to date I do worry it might one day just go pop in a way that's not economically viable to repair. The server lives on a shelf high up in a cupboard so dust isn't much of an issue and temps of drives happily sit around 28-30C (82-86F) so really just wondering at what point I'm likely to be living on borrowed time (I suspect I already am!)?
I saw your suggestion of the Gen 10 Plus above, and that's defo an option (although lack of an optical bay is a minus, as I was always tempted to fit one to the N54L for running Handbrake straight onto the storage - having not done it so far, it's defo not a deal breaker!). From a practicality point of view, if I swapped/cloned my OMV installation drive into a Gen 10 Plus is OMV likely to 'just work' and be a simple hardware swap, with maybe a repair of the install to deal with hardware differences, or will I need to treat it as a completely new install?
Are there other generations of the micro servers still in production that are worth looking at as options?
Many thanks
Adrian