Didn't the guy at the shop fix the DVD writer for you? They did it for me. It took a while though because of the torq screws and because it's quite small space. Now, I have already taken the DVD writer out because I needed the top space to put the 160GB Seagate boot drive there to make space for the 4 Samsung F4EGs at the bottom.

Anyway, I'm also a newbie. I've no experience with Vail. A little bt of experience in Windows Server. Still learning. Partitioning was a breeze as I used a single 8TB partition and devided to different share directories.

The reason I went with Server 2008 instead of Home Server on this machine is because I can take advantage of the motherboard RAID. This is also the reason why I was not too happy with the Acer as you'll be stuck with Home Server.

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Added on October 18, 2010, 11:33 am

Fan noise is very silent. I can only hear the 4 Samsung F4EG hardisk writing / reading if I put my ear in front of the casing. I don't have any equipment to measure power consumption but for a NAS with a CPU, it should still be pretty low. The Motherboard Monitor software does not really recognise the board / chip but it reads 5.1W at idle and max 9.1W.

I don't have many people connected to the server. I find it plenty fast for my use. I stream 1080p mkv files and even 40Mbit Bluray .m2ts files at 24p to my 46" LCD over wired LAN with no problems while simultaneously running Winrar to achieve files on the RAID 0 array in the background. If I'm not wrong, HP says the N36L is suited for small business not more than 10 people. I was looking for good read and write NAS performance and I find the network performance very good. From the Bandwidth Monitor program, the throughput easily hits the 1GBit LAN limit when transferring files from my other desktop to the server.

Check out some pics and review here;

http://www.tenniswood.co.uk/technology/rev...rver/#more-6595

http://www.tenniswood.co.uk/technology/win...nce-comparison/

Is it your streaming is from synology NAS --> router --> media player --> TV ?

I m using this way. But cannot play the file. I only can see the folder and the file. When try to play it, it keep skip to another file.

I measured 1080p full Bluray m2ts files and they need to be streamed at around 5MB/s or so. The 1080p mkv are much lower at 2 or 3MB/s depending on the decoding. So it's quite light on the network actually. A 100MBit network is more than enough. I decent NAS like from Synology should be able to stream at that speed. So my guess is it's the media player? What player is that?

My playback is through mediaplayer on the PC. I built a SFF Lian Li cube PC V351 and put it in the cabinet near the TV. At that time, I was tempted to buy the small dedicated media players but decided to build a PC for that because of more playback flexibility and because at that time, the dedicated media players were VERY expensive. I will try and stream 1080p HD stuff through my WD Player and see how it goes.

Anyway, I decided on the HP Microserver for my NAS needs not solely for smooth HD playback but because of these 5 things;

1. I can put 4 hardisk in for the ever growing need for space.
2. It's fast when I transfer and store TB of files over the network.
3. It's relatively cheap.
4. It's flexible because of the OS.
5. It's relatively small (smaller than my Lian Li PC V351).

Else, a good Gigabit network backbone and a cheap NAS solution would be fine just for normal HD mkv playback.

I wanted a 4 bay because I already had 2 units of 2-bay NAS (Linksys NMH300 and Buffalo LinkStation Duo) filled up with 2TB hardisks. While the Buffalo was fast and problem free, the Linksys always disconnected when you write big files to it. Reading is fine.

which model of NAS u use? if you use synology NAS year 2010 model.. ( model ended with x10 series) , it can support from 35MB/s up to 140MB/s with gigabit connection.

another way to test is play the same media file with your NB/PC. if it work this mean ur network and NAS is ok. than the limitation will be on your media player ( normally is not enough buffer -memory in your player)

Any link on the specs?