HP N40L Microserver Upgrade Advice

[Tbolt]

Looking to enhance my reliable little n40l. I have had it for almost 5 years now and it has served me well as a HTPC/Server, but I am looking to give it some love if possible. Granted its pretty restricted by the CPU, but given the low power consumption I try to live with it and work around it.

You can see the base specs here
I have added:
8GB DDR3 1333 RAM (2x4gb)
Radeon HD 6450 1Gb
2x2TB Seagate HDD
60GB SSD from 2011 (boot drive)
Blu-ray drive

What I am thinking about doing is getting a bigger/newer SSD to replace the boot drive, and add SSDs as I can get decent deals/they come down in price. Eventually I would maybe have something like 2x512GB SSDs and 2x1TB SSDs. Down the road these SSDs would go into a new machine and the n40l would go away.

Questions I have-
Will swapping my old "slow" ssd from 2011 make a marked difference?
Is there newer/faster ram I could look to add?
Watching blu-rays on this sometimes feels choppy, is there a better video card I could fit in it? Will that make a difference?


I know this is hardware forum, but question on OSs if anyone knows-
I am running Ubuntu 12.04 64-Bit and it works great but I wonder if 32-Bit would be better suited for my uses?

 

[Lt Broccoli]

Will swapping my old "slow" ssd from 2011 make a marked difference?

Unlikely, unless you're swapping hard. You're probably not with 8 GB though.

Is there newer/faster ram I could look to add?

It supports up to 16 GB of DDR3 1333, ECC or non-ECC. Probably not worth upgrading it though, unless you have some hand-me-down 8GB DDR3 sticks.

Watching blu-rays on this sometimes feels choppy, is there a better video card I could fit in it? Will that make a difference?

Are you using vaapi/vdpau acceleration during playback? You'll need the proprietary AMD drivers. Focus on making sure that is working before anything else.

I know this is hardware forum, but question on OSs if anyone knows-
I am running Ubuntu 12.04 64-Bit and it works great but I wonder if 32-Bit would be better suited for my uses?

Stick with 64-bit. Programs may use slightly more memory, but on Linux, binaries will be compiled specifically for 64-bit almost all the time, which more effectively uses the processor. I would, however, upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04 if you are having trouble getting accelerated playback working with your graphics card.

 

[Tbolt]

Thanks. Seems best to stick with my current RAM and video card. I'll also look into vaapi/vdpau and update to 14.04.

Will still get a 256gb/512gb SSD when a good deal comes along. That way I can keep more applications/media on it before moving it to a HDD for longer-term storage.