building a fileserver

jhewer

jhewer

jhewer

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Joined
4 Feb 2007
Posts
17
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
 
The PSU power rating has nothing to do with how much power they consume.

If you want the lowest power consumption try getting a mini-itx based system and putting it in a standard case. That way you have a motherboard/CPU combo that uses less than 10w under full load but has enough power for a file server. The boards usually use DDR RAM and have 1 PCI slot so you can add a RAID controller to it for storage needs. The standard case will allow you to store a bucket load of hard drives, check out silentPC for reviews on hard drive noise and operating temperatures. Get a good quality PSU like this:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CA-008-BT

It's going to be very efficient especially at the low load levels that a mini-itx based system will put it under. This means you'l end up with a system that even with 3-4 hard drives will use under 60w full load.
 
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
 
You could try a shuttle and a cheap amd or intel cpu and you dont need much cpu or ram. And then stick linux or Xp on and pop a 320GB hdd in it and PSUS for shuttles are only 250W and they are pretty silent from what i hear.
 
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
 
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if you want power-saving alternatives, you can try to get an AMD Turion 64 and pair it with a Socket 754 motherboard.

All you'll need is DDR ram and a casing.
 
Usually a "server" is a big case with lots of hard drives. So a Shuttle is a bad idea. You want a case to have upgrade potential as you add hard drives. Do you have a lot of data? Thought about a full tower?
 
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...
 
Dureth said:
If you want the lowest power consumption try getting a mini-itx based system and putting it in a standard case.
Click to expand...

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
 
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