I’m working on building a new home server for our media and documents. Up until just recently I used a little shuttle mini-pc with an external Western Digital MyBook II with RAID1. The MyBook II died (luckily the data on the drives was intact) and I decided it was time for an “upgrade”.

Mainboard Requirements:

• Low power usage
• Cool and Quiet
• Redundant
• Dual-core
• Small size

Intel D945GCLF2 Atom Motherboard

I’ve always been a fan of the Mini-ITX form-factor, and really the Nano-ITX and Pico-ITX. The Pico-ITX is what I like to call “the hotness”; it’s crazy small and packs a lot of power. However, you get a little bit more power in most of the Mini-ITX boards so I’m really leaning in that direction.

As far as CPU, there are a few choices in the Mini-ITX arena. There is the pioneer to that space, VIA which has some pretty decent CPU offerings with some dual-core models, there is also AMD Geode, and then there is the new Intel Atom processor.

The Intel Atom processor is recently new, however it’s loosely based off of the successful “Intel Core” line and maintains a lot of the same instruction sets, sadly it does not retain the VT instruction set (that’s due out on the next model of Atom). The major advantage to Atom over a traditional Intel CPU is it’s extremely low power requirements, low power almost always means low heat output. Since this system will live in a closet, low heat is important.

Intel Atom inside

The Intel Atom 330 model is a dual core model, two cores on one chip. In addition to using hyper-threading technology, which is akin to hardware multi-tasking.

I found an Intel Atom 330 board on Amazon.com for a good price, so I jumped on it. While I’m waiting for that, I need to decide on how to clothe our new server.

Casing

Being that the server will live out it’s life locked up in a closet, aesthetics are not all that important. Here are the requirements:

• Quiet or fanless design
• Hold at least 2 3.5″ hard disk drives
• At least one PCI slot available
• Mini-ITX compatible (most all are)
• Small / efficient power supply (this might be difficult)

Tranquil PC T7 Server with HDx add-on (wall mount)

Some optional features would be a “passive” wall mount case. The passive cases usually look like a big heat-sink and are almost made for a solution like this. Unfortunately, the cases I’ve found are integrated solutions, and require 2.5″ HDD or are cost more money than I’m willing to spend. So I’m thinking a 1U short-depth rackmount case might fit the bill. The trick is finding one that I can flip the “ears” around and convert it into a wall mount case.

Of those integrated solutions, Tranquil PC has some pretty interesting offerings, but I don’t really want to order international. I someone in the US would pickup their product line, because it’s quite nice. In particular, I really like the T7 series. If you’re in the market for a pre-built home server I highly recommend their solution. It can be coupled with their T7-HDx, which mounts directly on top of the T7 to provide additional compact external storage.

Searching NewEgg, I found some potential HTPC style candidates here, here, and here… Those are all well and good, yet I know nothing about the efficiency of their power supplies, and based on some of the comments they just aren’t reliable ones. The nMEDIAPC case has a lot of room for storage expansion, however it costs twice as much and is a bit larger.

On the rackmount style front, NewEgg didn’t really have what I was looking for, and attempts to find a suitable case in other stores was pretty much a bust. I did find this one from ITX Depot which looks promising, however I think I’m going to keep looking around. Worst case, I’ll just go with one of the HTPC style cases and make a simple wall-mount bracket.

Hitachi Deskstar 7K1000

As far as RAM and hard drives, I happen to have 2GB of Crucial DDR2 RAM left over from a recent upgrade that should work nicely. For drives I was first looking at the Western Digital drives because they’re supposed to be a bit more efficient, however after seeing all of the recent failures I’ve decided to keep looking. Seagate drives, althought not really much more reliable, do have a 5 year warranty (as opposed to Western Digital’s 3 year warranty). I also noticed the equivalent Seagate drive has a 32MB cache as opposed to Western Digital’s 16MB cache. Finally, the HITACHI Deskstar 7K1000 seems to really be pulling ahead of the pack as far as speed and reliability in this arena. Here’s the post at Storage Review for the 7K1000.

Architecture

I plan on running the main OS on a USB stick. I’d really like to dedicate the hard drives to shared storage only and remove the OS from the mix completely. I’ll be running Linux, most likely Ubuntu, so it’s pretty much at home on a USB stick.

Swap space might be an issue, however I think with 2GB and very low requirements I may be able to get by without it.

Next steps

So, that’s it for now. With any luck my Intel Atom board will arrive this Tuesday (2008/12/02) and I’ll be able to begin testing. I’ll keep searching for a case, hopefully that search ends soon. Check back in the next week or so and I should have some updates for you.