This can be used to add an extra drive and has room for a legacy PATA drive with a converter card, which is a scenario we had to run. There's an optical bay as well, which is hooked up via a spare SATA port. Urion II Neo N40 processor with 2x 1MB L2 cache, it supports SSE4 instructions and AMD64-bit, and is rated at a low 15w TDP.Ī score of just 0.88 in Cinebench shows it lacks any real grunt, but it's more than capable for standard file serving. Powered by a basic dual-core 1.5GHz AMD T

These are the usual basic 3D-incapable affair, but that isn't an issue for a screenless server.Ī few last tidbits include Gigabit LAN, four front and two rear USB ports and one read eSATA port. The goodies don't end there, with half-length x16 x1 PCIe slots, and onboard graphics. It's damn near perfect with vital statistics to please every geek, from its four quick-release SATA bays that support 8TB of storage to its twin 800MHz DDR3 slots supporting up to 8GB of RAM.

There's a host of potential home server options on the market, but it was love at first sight with the HP Proliant Microserver. You don't have to bend to the whim of limited NAS services – with a home server you can choose to use FTP, Dropbox, iCloud or all of them together to create your own personal cloud. Having a home server means that even if new media formats or standards are released, the hardware can be easily updated, whereas a NAS would very likely not be.Ī server can also be upgraded, and offers full remote access both in terms of streaming services and a remote desktop. It's these last two items that really swing it for us. If you're willing to spend a little more (bearing in mind a decent dual-bay NAS will set you back £100, or closer to £179 with a drive), you'll get a more flexible server system including processor, memory, motherboard and a basic drive for £150 that will happily run any and all software you want, providing remote desktop access and full Windows server features. With options running from single drive up to full quad-drive RAID models, they will even take care of the whole boring issue of backing up your machines. You'll need to enable Wake on LAN via Device Manager > Network Adaptor > Properties

Home media servers