Thoughts for a more power efficient home server

[Evil-I]

Hi All,

As the title says really.

At the moment my home server is a bit of a monster. I inherited six 500Gb IDE drives a couple of years ago through work, as well as a proper 3Ware hardware RAID card (PCI-X). So I trolled a certain online auction site and got hold of a Tyan workstation motherboard and a pair socket 604 dual core Xeons and 4 Gb RAM.

I threw all this into a coolermaster stacker case (the original) with a pair of thermalright 120mm fan based heatsinks and a couple of SATA hard drives mirrored for the OS.

System works brilliantly! Running fedora core 10 linux, does all media hosting and backup duties for the household, hosts a teamspeak server, shares the printer and does all my torrrenting.

Problem is, at a rough guess it probably costs over £300/yr in electricity!

So I'm starting to think about what we can replace it with. I want to keep all the functionality and fault tolerance of our data, but would like it to be considerably more economical to run and maybe generate a little less heat.

Any thoughts?

Thanks,

E-I

 

[Coldzero]

My home server uses an Intel Atom cpu, they hardly use any power or kick out much heat.

 

[Evil-I]

Hi Coldzero,

Yes, that's the way I've been looking, my only concern is that until recently using on board bios assisted software raid has been a nightmare in linux, hence me preferring proper hardware raid.

I guess I either need a Atom system with a decent number of SATA ports on a chipset that supports raid 5 properly, or a atom motherboard that would support a pci-express based hardware raid card?

What cpu/board is yours?

Best,

E-I

 

[Coldzero]

Yeah not sure what boards are out there suitable at the moment. Mines an Asus AT3N7A board with a Intel Atom N330 which they don't stock anymore here.