The HP ProLiant Microserver N40L is a great compact server for a lot of home users, and small business owners. It can be a great NAS server, especially for those on a lower budget or the smaller design. But because of its smaller design, there isn’t much room to upgrade components or expand outside of the available 4 x 3.5” SATA hard drive slots. But, by omitting the DVD slot on the N40L, this opens up possibilities for storage options such as: A SSD as your OS, a mirrored RAID 1 of your OS, or boosting your write performance by using L2ARC on SSDs. We’re going to show a few ways you can easily add hardware to your server to dramatically improve your system performance.

The ToughArmor series maximizes the available space in your system, with several varying flexible configurations in either a single 5.25” or 3.5” device bay. The main focus is to make sure your drives are fully secured and protected, which is done by the unit’s full metal design. This also doubles as a passively cooled solution, while either a single or dual fan are included on the rear to provide an active cooling solution. The EZ Slide Mini & Micro Trays are included in the ToughArmor line, with each model using interchangeable trays for their compatible counterparts. The ToughArmor series are also designed with a hot-swapping ability that makes it simple to exchange hard drives in case of failure. Within seconds, you can recover from a drive failure by swapping out the drive with a new one, then inserting back into the enclosure. Ensuring your drives are secured, protected, and ready for any situation is what the ToughArmor series provides.

The ToughArmor series suggested applications include: Medical & Military systems, Media servers, NAS server and IPCs, approved and used by Tier 1 companies.

The DuoSwap is a very flexible single 5.25” device, allowing different hard drive combinations as it single 2.5”, 3.5” or even both hard drives at the same time to produce the maximum storage capability. Inserting two drives into the DuoSwap gives you many benefits. With two drives inserted you can easily boost your write cache performance, or hot swap either drives if required. This makes DuoSwap a perfect tool for swapping a 3.5” SATA hard disk drive or 2.5” SATA solid state drive.

ToughArmor MB994SP-4S with HP Micro Server:
http://nexentastor.org/boards/9/topics/8596

DuoSwap MB971SP-B with HP Micro Server:
http://homeservershow.com/the-icy-dock-5-25-hot-swap-drive-caddy-for-a-2-5-and-a-3-5-sata-drive-duoswap-mb971sp-b.html