Low power home server for <£200

scoobyrichuk

scoobyrichuk

scoobyrichuk

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I'm going to build a home server for backup and media streaming, I want it to be as quiet as possible and have low power consumption. I have around £200 to play with and I'll be using FreeNAS so £200 doesn't include an OS. I Know that I don't need anything too powerful, at the moment I'm thinking of buying this:

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=BG-368-AS
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=CP-194-IN&groupid=701&catid=6&subcat=793
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-053-SA&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1279
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=MY-010-OK&groupid=701&catid=8&subcat=813

Total = £191

I'm tempted by an Intel atom based setup due to the low power consumption but I don't know if this is possible within my budget. I plan to start with 1TB and would probably be adding another 1/1.5TB HD in the future, FreeNAS will be run from a USB Stick.
I'm new to server builds so any help is appreciated.
 
Ah, you have gone B-Grade. Best way to get a bargain. Looks ok to me as a home file server. But why not just get a NAS device instead?
 
FreeNAS > Most of the £200 NAS boxes I've seen :)

How about having a go at running ESXi on it from the USB stick and then sticking another drive in for images and running FreeNAS as a virtual machine?
 
if your going for an intel atom setup, then it might be worth checking out Pico PSU's.

They are just DC-DC converters, basically what you'd get in a laptop (requires an external power brick) but are totally fanless and come in a variety of power ratings from about 80watt to 120watt i think.
 
I'm currently putting a nas together based on an intel atom D495GCLF2 mobo. My aims are also for low power and quiet, but I'm after a few extra terrabytes... It was a close call between a gigbabyte 780 mobo and amd 5050e cpu, or the atom plus a pci sata card.

I've had a good play with FreeNAS over the last week or so. It's neat that it's so compact and boots off a flash drive. I've decided not to use it though because of a few problems:
- The latest stable release 0.69 doesn't have the network driver for the RTL8111C onboard NIC. You can make it work with a bit of mucking around with a spare PCI NIC and some shell commands.
- The alpha release of FreeNaS apparently works 'out of the box' with the NIC but it won't run Squeezecentre (for streaming music to squeezebozes) so isn't an option for me.
- It refused to boot after enabling smart disk monitoring options...
- I had a bit of a concern over how retrievable any data would be off the disks if there was a problem. FreeNAS is based on FreeBSD and uses UFS and linux won't read it (easily).
- read and write speeds over SMB didn't seem too fast either.

So I've currently got ubuntu server on it and playing with setting up software raid 5 over 3 x 1TB drives before I commit. Not exactly 'plug and play' like a commercial NAS, mind. Draws about 50W with 3HDDs, which I worked out at circa £50/year in electricity.

I'd go for WD green drives BTW - even though the F1 is faster you wouldn't see the benefit of this over the network. I would also go for a low wattage PSU - the "80% efficient" claims are only valid above 20% of full load and they seem to get less efficient below that. The pico psu sounds interesting if it can cope with a few HDDs starting up too...

Hope this helps.
 
i've got the 120watt version of it running a pentium M with 2 1tb WD greens at the min. the PSU should be more than capable of powering 4 WD greens and a slim line lappy style cd drive

I'm not sure if it applies to the Pico PSU or one of hte earlier varients of it but I do remember reading a warning about connecting it up to a full sized cd drive where the drive might draw too much power and kill the psu.

Check out the mini-itx based sites/shops for more info and details on the psu's
 
I've just put together an Atom mini-ITX home server with a Jetway dual-core Atom and JC113 chassis with a single 500GB 3.5" SATA HD. I'm only putting music and photo's onto it, so a single HD is fine for me (with Mozy Unlimited for backup to avoid the need for RAID).
 
Thanks for all the info posted so far, I'm still not sure what option to go for yet as I've decided I'd like to be able to stream video to an xbox 360 from my server. I cuirrently use tversity on my own pc to do this and it works well but it's only available for windows. Is anyone aware of any other applications that are capable of transcoding videos in real time whilst streaming to a 360 (that work in linux)? I'm not sure that FreeNas (or any of the other suggested alternatives) will be capable of reliably streaming video to a 360 as I believe the 360 can be fussy about playing certain video formats...?
 
I've decided that I'm going to need something with a bit more power than an atom based setup if I'm going to stream to an xbox 360 with tversity. Also, going for a mini itx system is going to limit hard drive space massively and I'm thinking that in a few months I'm going to want add more hard drive space so perhaps a c2d/amd x2 based system would be better. I'm happy to run something 24/7 as long as it's not consuming significantly more than 100w (will cost me around 20p a day in electricity). It's going to have to be quiet as it will probably be located in my lounge somewhere (near thr router.) I'm willing to up my budget a bit if necessary, so far I have come up with this:

ASRock 4Core1600 (£40)
C2D e5200 (£50)
2gb DDR2 RAM (£17)
1TB WD Green HD (£75)
Akasa Zen Case (£30)
Xilence 420w silent psu (£40)
That comes to £250 without an OS, if I'm going to run tversity (which I'd like to as it works flawlessly with my current pc) I'm going to have to run windows (xp or homeserver.) I'm sure some people will think that I should use linux or something based upon it but I'm thinking that for someone with no prior knowledge of Linux perhaps a Windows based system would be the best option. I'm hoping to undervolt the e5200, this should hopefully mean lower power consumption and less noisy fans being required.
Any comments are welcome...
 
you can get 4-drive ITX cases....isnt upto 8Tb enough? :p

It's going to have to be quiet as it will probably be located in my lounge somewhere (near thr router.) I'm willing to up my budget a bit if necessary, so far I have come up with this
Click to expand...

i would have though you'd be better off plugging that in to the tv then, rather than streaming to the xbox.
 
james.miller said:
i would have though you'd be better off plugging that in to the tv then, rather than streaming to the xbox.
Click to expand...

+1. And you wouldn't need as much processing power if you don't have to do the on-the-fly transcoding. The WD disks are quiet but if you're trying to keep the noise down then I'd suggest going for a case that has suspension mounts (which pretty much rules out all ITX and most uATX cases...)
 
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