Pros: Size, power consumption, build quality, bootable internal USB. It's a real server suitable for most any environment. I'm a big fan of Shuttle's form factor, but I can get used to this as well. Running WHS 2003 can be a bit of a chore, but there is a dedicated group on several easily 'googled' message boards both in the US and UK that are a wealth of information. I've had mine running XP and Win7 for testing with no problems or driver issues. WHS is having trouble coming to terms with the Display drivers I'm trying to feed it. I got mine from another vendor as there was a 'price war' going on a few weeks ago. The 'Egg had it on sale for $14 cheaper yesterday, even factoring in the CA sales tax. I'd most definitely be looking at another one of these when I need to build the next NAS/Server box. Overall this was an impulse buy based in large part on the great on-line community already using the chassis (WHS, FreeNAS, etc.) and reviews here at NewEgg. I haven't been disappo

Cons: None that were deal breakers. Remember that you need normal DIMMs. A helpful white shirt at FrenchFries thought he was doing me a favor by selling me RAM with the biggest heat spreader on the planet, even after I gave him the SKU of what i wanted. His excuse, 'Well what I wrote up was faster'. Fail. Anything taller/fatter than the heat sink on Corsair's regular XMS line might cause you trouble. As there are only four drive bays, if you want to get creative you can put two more 3.5" HDDs in the ODD bay. Search for N82E16816215114. Two of these can be arranged to hold the HDDs and still slot into the drive rails properly. And don't face palm me (yet)... I've got two 40mm fans and a 5.25 front grill from an Antec Twelve Hundred keeping air flow nice and clean. If heat becomes a factor up there I'm thinking that a 60mm fan could be added to the upper part of the rear chassis plate. That would be straight through air-flow, same (if not better) than the drive caddies below

Overall Review: I haven't been this jazzed by a SFF since I built my first shuttle seven years ago. For an enthusiast there are Eggcellent possibilities for packing even more into the N36L (even on a budget) than you might think. I'm looking at a 10+TB box for under $1000. This will actually allow me to truly backup my data! Get one. You (probably) won't regret it.

Pros: Really well built. Nice touches like the included torx wrench & spare screw holders. Compact size, exceptionally good air flow through the chassis (4 WD 2.0TB drives running nice & cool at ~27C). Runs FreeNAS pretty well, ESXi (for the most part).

Cons: Overall, it's a great little box but there seems to be problems related to the remote access card. ESXi 4.1u1 won't boot up correctly if the RAC is installed, FreeNAS 7 boots but then the keyboard doesn't work. I also found that ESXi would not boot when a cheap PCI-E SATA card was installed (same error as with the RAC). HP support was awesome, over-nighted me a new RAC, but the problem seems to lie in the BIOS or card firmware (FreeNAS complains about broken ACPI tables).

Overall Review: If HP could resolve the issues with the RAC this would be a 5-egg rating, but so far it's been a little frustrating considering that the RAC was one of the primary reasons that I chose this! Also, another poster mentioned using the HP-specific version of ESXi, but I got the PSOD with it...

Pros: - Incredibly well engineered - Been running for 2+ months without a hiccup - Easy to setup - Nice package - Onboard USB slot for booting from thumb drive

Cons: - The exhaust fan isn't the greatest - No SATA data cable for 5.25 bay - Somewhat difficult to disassemble - Case is slightly on the large side compared to other products in this class

Overall Review: First thoughts of this machine were an appreciation for the excellent excellent engineering that went into this design. Little details like the screws and tool being held in the front door incredible. Really must be seen to be appreciated. That being said, they cheaped out on the exhaust fan. After 2 + months of operation it's starting to be a little loud. I will likely have to replace it soon. Also the vibration from the fan will on rare occasion rattle the front door. Aside from some very minor issues I've been happy with this machine. Been running FreeNAS 8 on it since it was released and it works quite nicely. I do have some issues with the latest version of FreeNAS along with somewhat slow transfer speeds right now, but otherwise it's solid. I'm sure the transfer speeds could be upped with 8GB of RAM and a Linux install. For the money you can't really beat this solution. Everything else out there is either way more expensive or simply can't touch the processing power. Gra

Pros: Small, quiet, runs Freenas 8. Great value.

Cons: None that I can think of.

Overall Review: I am pleasantly surprised at the overall performance of this box. Freenas 8 with ZFS is awesome. I like how I can boot of an USB drive and the USB drive can be installed internally. I ditched the 1G of ram that came with and installed 8G (ZFS likes ram). The 250G drive it came with is useless, replaced it with 3 2T 5400rpm drives.

Pros: small, quiet, 4+1 sata ports (4 std disks and 1 using ODD). I set up FreeNAS 7 using 4 disks with software raid5, installed FreeNAS itself on a laptop drive using the ODD port for a 5th disk. Plenty of USB ports, vga to connect for OS install.

Cons: cpu seemed to have gotten bogged down when it was initializing the raid5 volume

Overall Review: there's an internal USB port that might be perfect for booting off a flash drive.

Pros: Small Size, Low Power and pretty good Disk Caddies for less than you could put together a similar system and about the price for a decent NAS were you are stuck with the OS that the manufacturer provides.

Cons: The HD and RAM included are pretty much throw away, would rather cut a few bucks off the price as you will need to buy bigger/more drives and more RAM anyways as WHS 2011 and most other OSes will want at least 2GB anyways.

Overall Review: Great box for Windows Home Server 2011, was planning on building my own box with hotswap bays, low power processor & motherboard and Energy Star Power Supply. This came with all I was going to buy, cost less, smaller size and looks nicer. I'm thinking of buying another one to put Linux on and using the RAM I pulled out of the first one to expand it to 2GB.

Pros: Small, quiet and easy to upgrade/manage. Quality of build is very good for the price. Easy to add memory, drives, DVD, etc. Even has an internal USB slot for bootable USB drives like Linux, FreeNAS, etc. So well thought out that there is a torx wrench stored inside the door for use in mounting drives.

Cons: Surprised that modern OSes (current Fedora, FreeBSD) do not recognize the drive supplied by HP, either 160G or 250G. FreeNAS 7 recognizes the drive but FreeNAS (FreeBSD) 8 does not. Just put in the drives you intend to store data on and it will work. A 160G is not too useful these days as primary storage.

Overall Review: Very happy with price and value. Still trying different OSes to see which I like best for my mix of Windows and Apple equipment. Watch out for OSes not recognizing the supplied drive- use the drive elsewhere and put in a different drive.

Pros: .cheap .quiet .small .low power .works right outa the box for FREENAS. .includes all screws and torx tool was able to use a usb cdrom, load embeded freenas to internally installed usb mem stick and was up and running with a 750gb drive from an older freenas setup in less than 20 minutes (after a few bios tweaks). will move my 2 2tb drives over to it in the next few days. the unit provides better performance than my older AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 3500+ and 3ghz celeron systems.

Cons: Having hard time with embedded raid configuration, and booting freenas...

Overall Review: Unit actually stays pretty cool with good air flow with minimal noise (not going to put it in my living room!), my other servers with multiple drives, crank out the noise and eat power - this little microserver is a nice change and the 1.6ghz processor is quite peppy...