an upgrade... (1 Viewer)

[sunny]

....not of my PC, but file server sitting at home. Atm its an old PIII 733 slapped into a vanilla server case, with a gigabit NIC and PCI SATA card added for two 500GB drives set up as one big drive with LVM. Theres an old (failing) 80GB IDE connected directly to the mobo with Ubuntu doing the work. All it does is serve files with samba and a headless BT client downloading during offpeak hours.

It works great, but the problems are:
1) Kinda old, has issues with power management so I can't spin the hard disks down.
2) A bit noisy, though its not in any of the rooms that people live in..
3) Would like to move on to RAID with a couple of extra drives eventually
4) Its just old, and I don't like it...

So I was thinking of getting one of those new Atom boards, shoving it into a bigger case, but problems:
1) They're mostly m-ITX, so only 2 on board SATA ports
2) Only one PCI port, so I lose out on a proper RAID card if I expand it with a SATA card
3) Would like to cut down the power requirements, so I was thinking of running the Ubuntu off USB or flash. Limited life, but the OS itself probably won't have much writing compared to the storage drives. Not sure about speed etc though.


Any thoughts?

 

[darkwolfzx]

Sure you don't want a normal sized mobo? I need to check the hardware we run on the servers at work more closely.

 

[sunny]

Its purely from a power perspective. The Atom boards wouldn't need much power and only use passive cooling. I don't need anything that powerful, seeing a PIII 733 is handling the load fine (though the mobo is old, I wouldn't mind faster transfer speeds to the drives)