Silent home server project

celliott

celliott

celliott

Soldato
Joined
21 Jun 2004
Posts
2,790
Location
Berkshire
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We have had a home server before as a central point of storage/backup for everyones documents, to host some basic websites and also rip our DVD collection on there to make life easier.

I used to use a old Dell, but got rid of it because it was quite noisy and I didnt like the noise in my room all the time.

I now have my PC with RAID1 which I leave on pretty much all the time. When it comes to it, it really is stupid having such a powerful system on 24/7 wasting electric etc.

So I want to build a new home server. It MUST be as quiet as possible, and also fairly small. The plan is to put it in the lounge behind a sofa or something. We will be connecting it via a powerline adaptor to make life easier.

Our network is 100Mbit so it does not need to be particuarly high spec. I will be working in the order of Reliability > Silence > Performance. It does not need to be particuarly high spec, as long as it is silent and cool. A celeron 1Ghz would do the job fine.

My PC is built in a "silent" antec solo case, and it is fairly quiet. However if possible I would like the server to be quieter than this. To be honest the noisiest thing seems to be the hard disks as one of them resonates a bit.

What would you reccomend in terms of case/hardware? I COULD take the bits out of my Antec solo and put them into my old gigabyte case, however I would rather not go down that route.

Note: I will also be working on a budget of say £300 max, the lower the better. The majority of this will be spent on two large drives for RAID1.

Thanks
 
You raise a valid point about the hard disks making the noise. I have built a fair few systems and as good as they have been in terms of my main goals being aimed towards silence, I have always been waiting for the day when we can really realistically do away with hard disk drives. You could consider solid state drives now as the price has come down a lot, but it's still obviously not the best value for money, especially given the objectives of this sytem, i.e. holding a fair few files to access.
However, you could have a really low spec quite box for behind the sofa as you put it, that has very quick SSD drives that stream live via gigabit ethernet from another server say in the loft or wherever. I'm not sure if this is practical for you but it is an option you could look at.
Have you had a look at the silentmaxx drive kits?
 
Look at the new Intel Atom based boards - far better than the VIA stuff and very low power/heat. Cheap too.
Click to expand...

Actually the latest VIA processor is VERY comparable to the Atom, beats it in quite a few things.
 
Would I be better off going with an Atom based system or something like a Celeron 430?

From what I understand Atom CPU's are about half as powerful as a modern celeron.
 
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