Mini Home Server

Halestorm

Halestorm

Halestorm

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Joined
2 Dec 2011
Posts
518
Location
Sheffield, UK
Hi Guys

Looking for a few hardware recommendations, I want to set up a home server, mainly for Media storage and Web-Hosting
Looking at spending about £350 (already got Hard Drives to use) looking at something small, possible mini-itx size?
Let me know what you guys think would suit me best

Cheers :D
 
HP Microservers are well considered, but they aren't particularly great at full price: they get raved about because a group of people got them for pretty much half price with a discount+cashback offer a while ago. For that price, they were superb: for the full price, they are decent if they match your use closely, but it's worth pricing up a slightly more powerful home server to build yourself if you want more than a glorified NAS.
 
I was thinking of maybe a build in a BitFenix Prodigy, I have looked at the HP Microserver as my work buddy has one and recommends it, as he uses it for the same thing.

So would you say that the HP micro is better than a home build? Id guess it would be because its designed specifically for what I want, but would a intel build be better than the preconfigured AMD?
 
It depends what you want to do with it.

Check out my post here for what is my home server.

I preferred this approach rather than the Microserver build because it's more flexible, and I can re-use some components if I decide to upgrade. With a Microserver, if you outgrow it, you have to replace the whole thing.
 
If you go for a custom build, I would opt for an Intel CPU as you won't need the integrated graphics of an AMD chip, and they use less power.

How many HDDs are you going to be using? Most ITX motherboards will have 4 SATA ports.
 
4 drives, 1 OS and 3 Storage so 4 SATAs would be fine.
I think I will go for something similar to @Confused but maybe in a Prodigy as It will in view in the room it lives in.
 
I'm not sure if OCUK will be stocking the newer Ivy Bridge Celeron CPUs (G1610 and G1620), but they are about 10-15% faster clock-for-clock than the Sandy Bridge versions. They use slightly less power as well and are a bit cheaper.
 
I have an ASRock B75M in my server. 8 SATA ports and I still need to use the PCIe slots for more :( but 6 will most likely be the max on a mITX board. But the Prodigy don't exactly have a lot of HDD space so that won't be an issue.
 
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