Soldato
- Joined
- 24 Apr 2006
- Posts
- 6,412
- Location
- SE England
I am after a new motherboard and CPU.. needs to be cheap!
Firstly here is what I am after
At least 6 onboard SATA ports
On board Gigabit LAN
2 or more PCI slots
On board GPU
The server will be used for file storage to uncompress RARs and rebuild via PAR files.
If it is a power efficient CPU then even better but again keeping cost down is key as most of my costs will be going towards hard drives expansion is also something key as I am going to want many drives for future use.
I started researching and quickly came across the AMD based Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2H Motherboard this seemed perfect as it has 6 SATA ports and is quite cheap. But then I started reading some people have issues with this motherboard and WHS to do with the drivers of the onboard SATA controller which uses two different controllers across the 6 ports. Issue with the drivers. Read all sorts of random blue screens and crashes... some have fixed it others I'm not so sure about... So that kinda put me off that mobo.
Then I came across this Intel motherboard Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L at a crazy price of a mere £30 brand new! For this price it isn't worth going second hand, only 4 port SATA though. Scanning over the net I can't seem to find any reports of problems with this motherboard and WHS. Also seems to get great reviews for such a budget board. I would probably stick a Intel Celeron Dual Core E1400 2GHz in it, would that be ok for what I want to do?
Any ideas for a case that could hold a fair few harddrives, say 12 for cheap?
Have I over looked any other cheap mobo options that have 6 port sata? My head is spinning abit from looking at spec sheets and googling. I know that WHS will run on almost any old hardware but I would like something that is going to be able to handle heavy downloading/decompressing and have abit of a future.
Thanks for your comments and advice in advance
Firstly here is what I am after
At least 6 onboard SATA ports
On board Gigabit LAN
2 or more PCI slots
On board GPU
The server will be used for file storage to uncompress RARs and rebuild via PAR files.
If it is a power efficient CPU then even better but again keeping cost down is key as most of my costs will be going towards hard drives expansion is also something key as I am going to want many drives for future use.
I started researching and quickly came across the AMD based Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2H Motherboard this seemed perfect as it has 6 SATA ports and is quite cheap. But then I started reading some people have issues with this motherboard and WHS to do with the drivers of the onboard SATA controller which uses two different controllers across the 6 ports. Issue with the drivers. Read all sorts of random blue screens and crashes... some have fixed it others I'm not so sure about... So that kinda put me off that mobo.
Then I came across this Intel motherboard Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L at a crazy price of a mere £30 brand new! For this price it isn't worth going second hand, only 4 port SATA though. Scanning over the net I can't seem to find any reports of problems with this motherboard and WHS. Also seems to get great reviews for such a budget board. I would probably stick a Intel Celeron Dual Core E1400 2GHz in it, would that be ok for what I want to do?
Any ideas for a case that could hold a fair few harddrives, say 12 for cheap?
Have I over looked any other cheap mobo options that have 6 port sata? My head is spinning abit from looking at spec sheets and googling. I know that WHS will run on almost any old hardware but I would like something that is going to be able to handle heavy downloading/decompressing and have abit of a future.
Thanks for your comments and advice in advance
