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[hasu]

Any suggestion for a low power motherboard for NAS?

I am trying to build a simple NAS for media streaming and general purpose file storage. What would be an appropriate motherboard with the lowest possible power consumption (including CPU)? No preference between AMD and Intel. Thinking of using about 512 MB ram and Linux server OS. Thinking of using two WD Green drives in Raid-1 for storage and a CF card for OS so that the storage drives can be suspended when not in use.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Abandoning this thread. Instead of building from scratch, I ended up using the following setup for my NAS:

1. Seagate Goflex Home with ArchLinux, boot from a 2GB USB flash drive and uses one 2TB drive for storage. Using minidlna and samba. With hard drive spin down, it usually runs at 3.5W and goes up to about 7 to 8 watts at full load (measured by Kill-a-watt)

2. QNAP-212. Has a lot of features, mainly software, which will be hard to build on my own (DLNA, Samba, Music Station, Video Station etc and LAMP for a personal website if you want!). Power consumption (QNAP+Two 2TB WD Green Drives) is around 6-7 watts when hard drive is in standby mode and 13-14 watts at full load.

 

[Cerb]

We'll need a lot more info than that. But, most importantly, what's your budget? For a typical NAS box, you do not need a powerful CPU, so a low-end Intel or AMD will probably suffice.

Rather than a CF card, which will involve adding another card, one way or another, why not just get a small SATA SSD?

 

[hasu]

We'll need a lot more info than that. But, most importantly, what's your budget? For a typical NAS box, you do not need a powerful CPU, so a low-end Intel or AMD will probably suffice.

Rather than a CF card, which will involve adding another card, one way or another, why not just get a small SATA SSD?

I was looking at Atom based motherboards. Not sure if AMD has anything similar. Low power consumption is of prime importance. Looking for performance of about 30-40 MB/s over gigabit network, whcih is similar to the low end (around $150) QNAP devices. Thought of using CF card because I have a 4GB card as well as an IDE adapter lying around. That may be necessary if I chose to use older Atom motherboards with only two SATA ports. If there are better options with all/more SATA ports I can certainly use a 32GB SSD as boot device.

I have not really thought about budget, because I have some of the components lying around. (such as SFF case, WD drives, CF/SSD, most flavors of SDRAM modules etc). I have an atom 330 machine running Windows Vista Home, I could salvage motherbaord from it and upgrade that machine to 510 . But if there are better options I might consider that.