building a fileserver

[jhewer]

Hey,

I'm thinking of building a fileserver for home to store all my music, photos, etc. I have two computers, my main PC in the bedroom (short on space in the living room) and I want to be able to access the music through my Powerbook in the living room which will be hooked up to my Hifi.

My PC is fairly power hungry, so the plan was to build a low power fileserver which I can leave on most of the time, and which both computers can access over a wireless network.

Initially I was looking at the Buffalo Linkstation or Synology Disk Station products, but neither seem to be perfect. However, they do benefit from really low power consumption.

I was thinking of a shuttle, but even these have 200W+ PSU's.

If anyone can advise me on suitable hardware/spec's that would be great.

Cheers,
Jon

 

[jhewer]

thanks for the advice, i'll take a look into that.

any recommendations on a mini-itx board and CPU combo. (and i want to try and keep the cost of building this down...)

cheers

 

[jhewer]

Shuttle's just seem quite expensive compared to the other barebones available.

You seem to get more for your money with different brands, e.g.

BioStar iDEQ N1
Asus P1 AH2

Thanks

 

[jhewer]

No I don't have that much data really, would like to be able to hold a couple of hard drives and a CD drive.

Something compact is ideal for me (short on space) and like I said before, efficiency is also important.

I have a spare IDE drive, and I was planning on getting a 320gig SATA which will act as the main data store. Ideally, I was hoping to build a system for around about the 200 pound mark, but now I think that might be difficult...

 

[jhewer]

If you want the lowest power consumption try getting a mini-itx based system and putting it in a standard case.

So will most standard cases take a mini ITX board, or do I need to check for support specifically? Could I just get a micro ATX case?

Thanks