Re: Low cost, energy efficient home pc server?

["Rich Braun" <user=44@nabble.blu.org>]

 I had a low-power micro-ATX server based on a VIA processor for the past 
couple of years.  Decided to retire it just this past month in favor of more 
storage:  I'm an HDTV afficionado and have decided that I really want 
everything in the house, including a thousand DVDs and a few hundred home 
videos, in one server. 

6 terabytes should do the trick.  This is no longer cost-prohibitive at $150/TB. 

The old VIA processor wasn't up to snuff, can't handle the data throughput I 
need now.  Also, I want to virtualize servers for security reasons.  (Some 
here have pooh-poohed virtualization because in theory the O/S should be able 
to handle everything that a hypervisor would.  But if I want different 
security domains i.e. separate root pw's for managing my household Apache 
server and my household MySQL server and my household email server in case one 
of them gets breached, what other choice is there?  SELinux?) 

Enter the Core 2 Duo.  The server I built around a Super Micro X7SBL-LN2 
motherboard with the E8400 3GHz processor runs at 96 watts with two drives 
spinning, maxing out around 150 watts with 7 drives running. 

By comparison, the VIA-based system ran at 47 watts with two drives spinning. 

System works well but with one unresolved headache:  getting SATA device 
resets and SMART monitoring warnings for a couple of the disk drives.  I think 
I went too cheap on these; found three heavily-discounted Hitachi external USB 
units that got discontinued by Best Buy, and after returning two defective 
units for replacement, installed them internally (USB doesn't provide the 
spindown timer parameter needed for electrical power savings.  Plus the 
external unit provided by Hitachi has no fan if you settle for that, it runs 
quite hot.)  Hitachi might have a better product on the market by now but my 
hunch is Best Buy had good reason for discontinuing these things. 

I bought a Baseboard Management Controller (about $50) from Super Micro for 
this thing, too, hoping to get a remote console interface for it so I don't 
have to use a separate keyboard/monitor for the server.  Alas, it has to be 
configured with ipmitools which is a bear to install on openSUSE (and even 
many other flavors of Linux) so I never got my remote console working. 

-rich 


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