[CentOS] Low End NAS hardware.

Wed Oct 21 15:57:46 UTC 2009
Toby Bluhm <tkb at alltechmedusa.com>

Drew wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> The recent discussion on NAS/SAN and the Thecus N8800 got me to thinking.
> 
> Bit of background. I have an old Dual Athlon MP2800+ that I'm using
> for a home web/file server. It runs fine but between the noise of the
> various fans and it's location in the living room, I've been asked by
> my spouse to find a replacement for it that's smaller & quieter.
> Looking at the Thecus, and based on experience with Atom based
> Mini-ITX systems at work, I was thinking about rolling my own.
> 
> My questions is, for a small home server that runs apache/php/mysql
> and Samba, how well do the Mini-ITX boards like the VIA C3/7 & Intel
> Atoms handle this sort of task? I've used VIA systems as MythTV
> frontends but never as file/web servers. I'd expect they'd do fine for
> home use but I've never tried.
> 

I looked at doing the same thing. I have an old Athlon XP ~ 1800 MHZ at 
home, made noise, pumped a lot of heat into the closet. Sure, itx would 
be low power and smaller, but the pieces parts seemed quite pricey to me 
and what I had worked fine. So I cranked the cpu speed down in the bios 
to 700 MHZ, lowered the cpu voltage, switched the case fans to run off 
5v. Still runs apache, samba, firewall, dhcpd, etc. without a hitch. 
Never noticed the slowdown in normal activities.


Dual processor board? Try removing one cpu to cut down on power.


-- 
tkb