6 SATA iTX Motherboard

[est1984]

My first post here guys and I hope first of many. Have been recommended this site many of times but for some reason avoided it until now.

Anyway I need some help from my fellow tech savy people.

I am trying to build a NAS system, after viewing the Fractal Design Array case I am determined to build the system in this. Absolutely in love with it.

So anyway I know that I want to build the largest possible NAS system I can for a reasonable price. I have decided to built a 12TB system with 6 2TB HDD's, I don't know if it'll exactly be 12TB, with or without a RAID setup (i dont know if this is possible, my understanding of RAID is that it just gets a bunch of hard drives and displays it as one hdd on the system, then you got a number of configurations you can do, however in most of them you tent to loose the amount of space you have).

So one of my concerns is that it has be a low power consuming unit as it can be left on 24/7 or possible 12/7. From what I read is that AMD chips tend to pull the least amount of electricity, I have been recommended a AMD Sempron 140, however I can't find a AM3 iTX board with 6 SATA ports.

Unless you guys can come up with a better option I am not really too bothered if its a Intel or AMD board but I just dont want it pulling too much power. Also I am concerned about he space in the Fractal Design Array case, I don't know if I'll be able to fit in a big CPU fan, something which I really want to avoid doing.

I know what I am going to get but it's just the motherboard that is hard to nail down.

Also another quick question, do you guys think I can get away with powering 6 SATA drives motherboard and cpu with a 300W PSU?4

 

[Zap]

Yes, the included 300W PSU (likely an FSP) will do fine with 6 drives and a low powered CPU.

The Zotac H55 chipset mini ITX boards have six SATA ports. You can get a cheap Pentium Dual Core G9650 and it will be reasonably power efficient. I think I measured my mom's system (H55 chipset mATX, G9650 CPU, 2GB RAM, single SSD) at under 40W power draw from the wall under normal usage (web browsing, etc.).

The stock retail boxed HSF that comes with the CPU should fit fine and be sufficient to cool the system. Serving up files does not really stress the CPU that much.

So where are you buying your Array from? I'm somewhat interested in one, but don't know of a place in the USA to buy one.