Hardware choices for DIY NAS

[zedpol]

Sooo I was hoping someone could weigh in on good hardware choices for a NAS of the following flavor. Or if you know a good resource.

1) Low power (hopefully idle <30 watts)
2) able to hit reasonable transfer speeds. Maybe RAID 5 but i'm not opposed to RAID 1
3)Small footprint
4) Quiet
5) everything but the hard drives for less than 400 dollars (300 would be better)
6) linux compatible

I was thinking the new MSI Atom board, http://www.logicsupply.com/products/ms_9830 but i can't find power consumption data anywhere. (I assume it is better because it uses the mobile version of the 945)

Or maybe one of the Via boards. I'm not a huge fan of those because i've build a box and it has crappy linux support (i think mainly because of the southbridge)

And lastly, one of the faster geode boards.

Anyone been thinking the same thoughts? i would love some input.

Z

 

[00Roush]

My personal opinion is that the Atom and Via platforms currently don't offer enough performance and are very limited when it comes to upgrading. From what I have seen a Core 2 platform or a Athlon 64 platform can offer similar idle power consumption but offer much more room to grow. For example a few articles I have seen show the Atom platforms at around 25-30 watts at idle and full load is around 35 watts or so. The Core 2 and Athlon platforms can idle at about 35 watts with the latest setups but full load usually end up in the 60-80 watt range.

With that said, the Atom platform you linked to would probably fit your bill but would not offer much room to upgrade later if you wanted.

Please read this thread... http://forums.smallnetbuilder.com/showthread.php?t=687 Follow the links in the second post as they provide some more information. Also after posting to that thread I have found that the ASUS P5N7A-VM motherboard (Geforce 9300 IGP) also offers fairly low power consumption at idle when paired with a E7200 Core 2 Duo CPU. Here's the link http://www.silentpcreview.com/article892-page1.html If you are looking for a home theater platform the Geforce 9300 based boards look to be the best you can find so far. Here is another link... http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=3432

00Roush

 

[valentin]

There is nice mini-ITX format motherboard + Athlon 3000+ CPU with PCI and DDR2 slots for 100 euro in the Conrad shops in Germany. You may order it by phone from their catalog. But I do not know what is the power consumption, your first requirement.
________
TOYOTA AXV-IV