HP N54L.

4x 3.5" internal drive-bays with trays (no hot-swap), 1 External 5.25" bay, 1 internal 3.5" bay, 2 PCI-E, 8 GByte ECC, takes 4 TB drives, 6 external USB2, 1 external E-Sata, 1 GB/s NIC. There is an HP-ILO Card for out-of-band servive - access to bios, power down. 1 internal usb (could boot OS from USB...)

excellent VPN / and storage server (VPN ~ 340 MBit/s AES 256 throughput) (put VPN Server in virtual machine)

mini-server ist suff. powerful to run data server at high speed. 5x4 TB raw ~ 16 TByte Raid 5 storage size, 1 additional external hot spare possible.

There seems to be a lot of love for these things. It's hard to give up the 4-core xeon and the lower price of the TS140, definitely food for thought. Thanks!

Edit: Based on the reviews, it looks like it has previously been on sale for as little as $229 after rebates, which would make it a much easier choice than the current $399.

For reference: the google results -- http://google.com/search?q=%22small+server%22+%22hot-swappab...

Thanks, but I was hoping to get a feel for what HN crowd might be using, to see if there are some systems that keep coming up.

In short... Proliant Micro Servers (the black "g7" not the silvery g8's)...

Cheap, 4 bays, ECC mem and an (optional) mangement card... but I don't know if it is fast enough for you (probably not....)

Thanks! I've seen a few comments that also mention the Proliants, people seem pretty satisfied with them. And it might not be too slow, my current Plex server is my 2010 MacBook Pro.