I have a couple of N36L machines and I think they are great.
I want to implement Windows SBS 2011 Essentials in my relatively small office and I think getting a better processor might be helpful.
It seems Ebay has the best deal going at $269 shipped lately but was hoping someone might know of anything better. Hopefully Shoppingexpress might do another deal soon.
cheers
And they are also priced much higher at US$449 (celeron) and US$529 (pentium).
Check some historical deals here. ShoppingExpress once sold them for $229. You might want to ask them whether there's another sale coming soon.
Shopping express had a deal on Microservers 2 weeks ago - $229, accompanied by packages on various accessories.
It didn't get enough votes to appear on the daily digest, probably suggesting the ozbargain market is saturated for the $229 N54.
Looking to build a FreeNas/Nas4Free box and considering a microserver vs building something with a SR30169 case and C60M. The HP is cheaper, especially if they bring back this deal, but not sure about the non hot swap drive bays.
One thing I'm not sure of is the non hot plug bays. Is there a particular reason it can't hot plug, as the chipset supports it as far as I know.
HP did it so so people who need that ability buy their more expensive servers
On the N40L I'm sure I applied a BIOS mod to enable hot-swapping. Never actually tried it though.
If you're only after a FreeNAS box you may as well go with an N40L over an N54L if you ask me (even if just for this feature).
There were, but be aware that the g8 versions have now been launched - better processors, dual NICs, etc.