home fileserver - athlon 5350?

[melloyellow]

Hi guys,
I'm thinking about building a simple home fileserver, with 1-2 pairs of mirrored 3.5in drives and a gigabit ethernet network. No HTPC duties needed, so I'm thinking Athlon 5350 + AM1 Mobo for low power and low cost? It looks like I can get the pair from Fry's for like $40 total. What do you guys think?

Concerns are:
- only 4 SATA ports, would all be used by 2 pairs of data disks. Can I run a separate boot disk off usb somehow?
- only 1 pcie slot - can use for SATA expansion for another 4 ports?
- a bit outdated - anything newer from AMD or INTEL worth considering?
- will it be discontinued soon? Do I need to buy sooner rather than later?

Thanks!

 

[dave_the_nerd]

1) Yes. Most Linux distros will boot from USB without any changes or fiddling. FreeBSD and Windows, not so much though. (Although there are pre-fiddled exceptions.)
2) If you want.
3) Naah.
4) Not until AMD has something better to replace it with. They don't.

 

[mindless1]

Yes I'd toss a PCIe SATA card in for more ports, IF you use a case that supports more drives. Keep in mind that if you'd ever put SSDs on that card, many are PCIe 2.0 interface and would benefit from a x2 lane PCIe slot, but since there aren't PCIe x2 slots on consumer motherboards, you'd ideally pick a board with a x4 lanes or better PCIe slot available. Note that some boards may provide a full length x8 slot but only have x2 or x4 lanes wired to it, but for your purposes this would be enough lanes.

Granted, GbE would still be the bottleneck with a card operating over x1 PCIe lane, but you may find yourself moving a lot of files around from drive to drive within the fileserver rather than over the lan.