Shhhh I'm making excuses!!

Nah to be honest I can go external, I can go 'extreme' but HP are still doing the £100 off every other month years later so wait till they do it again, add a single 1 TB drive to start and a £20 GFX card and I'm the uber man of the house share.

I can live with that and its the best way to get 8x 2TB drives instead of 4x 3TB drives and 4x 2TB F4's going to waste

HP are still doing the £100 off every other month years later so wait till they do it again

Sorry mate, get your wallet out... It's every month, not every other month, it's on offer at the moment at £110 cashback..

Are you connecting the server direct to the Internet, or via a router? If the latter the the router firewall should e sufficient? I generally don't use the software firewalls as my router gives me the protection.

I think you would have trouble finding a faceplate for that unless it came with the slimline drive, maybe you could go old skool and mod your own one with a Dremel?

The only place I can think of that might do something suitable is http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/

Or maybe something like this? http://www.amazon.com/Silverstone-5-25-Inch-Converter-Slot-Load-FP58B/dp/B007C1KPQY

Seems overclockers do them too http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-196-SV&campaign=pcm/googleshopping&pup_c=gs

Yeah you would have no problem attaching a powered hub like that to the back for extra ports, one of the great things about USB is being able to daisy chain them.

Right, I hope I have no bought everything I need to build this system. A few items I had bought already need to be returned as either they do not fit or I have changed my mind on the build! I bought a graphics card which, although low profile, has a huge heat sink on it which prevents it from being installed in the machine. I also bought an external DVD writer and a 5.25" to 3.5" bracket as I was going to fit a fifth HD in the optical drive bay.

So, the spec will be as follows:-

4 x 2TB data disks (2 of these are brand new and 2 will be brought over from my existing media centre once all is up and running properly)
1 x 'normal' internal DVD player
1 x SSD Sandisk SataIII 64GB OS drive somehow sitting on or under the optical drive. This will be connected via a 0.5m eSATA to SATA cable routed from the outside of the case, through the 2nd PCI opening and via a molex to twin SATA power cable
ATI Radeon™ HD5450 512MB Graphics Card
I also bought and inserted an extra 2GB stick of RAM the other day for around £15 from PC World. TBH, I am not sure if this will work as it is not the same brand (though it is the same speed) as the supplied HP RAM - what do you think?
2 x single USB tuners hanging off the back of the machine via a USB hub

I will be running W7 with XBMC etc. There will be no RAID as I would rather backup manually to an external hard disk. When my ISP upload speeds are good enough, I may consider off site backup which would be great.

The cost so far has been about £100 for the server, £160 for the 2 hard disks, £40 for the SATA disk, £40 for the GFX card and £15 for the RAM, so £355 in total. If I can get it to work, that seems pretty good to me for an 8TB HTPC using far less electricity than my existing setup.

So with regards to RAM, the new stick I bought is not ECC. Does it matter if there is one ECC and one none ECC?

I may just persevere with my wireless G network for the time being. There isn't really much that needs to be streamed to other machines in the house - its really just to get broadband onto my HTPC.

Incidentally, I will alos be running Squeezebox server as I have 3 or 4 Squeezebox devices around my house. Does anyone know of an alternative to Squeezebox Server (that will still run with my SB devices), or should I just stick to this?

I now have most of my n40l server setup, from a hardware and OS point of view. I have a 64GB SSD drive stuck to the top of my optical drive, connected via an eSATA to SATA cable from the outside port.

The first thing I did was to update the BIOS to the 'bay' BIOS, so I downloaded the HP BIOS, followed the instructions and substituted the HP BIOS file for the modded BIOS file. Rebooted with the USB stick and the BIOS 'seemed' to update OK. Now when the computer boots, the post screen seems to mention the Bay bios as it loads up, so I assume that it has installed correctly.

However, within BIOS, I do not seem to be getting some of the menus that some of the threads in various forums seem to suggest I should be getting. For example, this thread shows a photo of a Sothbridge screen: http://homeservershow.com/forums/index.php?/topic/3397-modified-bios-for-microserver-n40l-enables-hidden-features/

Now I do get a Southbridge page in the BIOS, but there are only two options there. I am at work now so I don't have the n40l next to me to know exactly what it says, but for sure there are none of the options shown in that picture.

Does this sound normal?

One thing I do notice with the machine is that it isn't as quiet as I was hoping it might be. This machine will sit beneath my TV in the living room, so I wanted something as quiet as possible. I have seen a thread about changing the case fan for something quieter (which isn't as straightforward as it should be due to the arrangement of pins on the fan/motherboard connector. However, the thread suggests that a good portion of the noise comes from the small PSU fan rather than the case fan, and this, of course, cannot be changed. A pity it is as loud as it is.