Home server motherboard

[NRaygun]

I've seen the question in the forum before but it was for a larger number of users.

What are the main characteristics to consider for a server motherboard? My little server in the basement has full hard drives and the BIOS of the board doesnt recognize the bigger drives(in fact, I had to trick it into thinking a new drive has lower capacity to get by the POST). It's probably time to get a new server - the current machine is a cheap 500MHz Super7-based board. It's been fine.

Of the mainstream boards out there, what motherboard would make a good home server? When considering server boards, what characteristics should be taken into account. Obviously stability is a big one, but how is this guaged?

Should I just get a good low-end board/CPU combo with integrated video and NIC and maybe RAID? I've had pretty good luck with ASUS.

I see that Dell uses a Celeron 2.4 in what appears to be an Intel based motherboard(their 400SC line). I'm not expecting big performance, just reliable, scalable performance.

What do you think?

 

[mechBgon]

Have you considered PCI ATA cards to support larger hard drives? They're quite cheap. If you want a new board/CPU/RAM combo, Asus A7N266-VM/AA's are very stable and reliable in my experience (based on a sample of about 3 dozen). Use Crucial PC2100 RAM, a high-quality power supply (Antec SL350 maybe) and perhaps a 1.6GHz Duron and a Speeze FalconRock heatsink/fan unit.

Any PC can be a "server" so unless you want to hear about "real" servers, there isn't really any answer beyond it needing a network adapter and networkable operating system so it can communicate with other computers.

 

[Vette73]

IMO a decent and cheap server for you would be....


Board: Chaintech KT600 $53 Has SATA ports so can support a decent amount and variety of hard drives
Chip: AthlonXP-M 2400+ Runs very cool, if you want to go really cheap get a standard XP or even a 1.6Ghz Duron
Ram: 512mg PC2700 There is some at staples starting tomorrow for $59 after rebate

 

[airfoil]

Question is, what are you going to be using the server for? How many clients? For a file/print server, an Athlon XP will do fine and get a mobo that supports SATA & IDE RAID.

 

[airfoil]

If you're looking for a high end Server board, go to the bottom of this page

 

[Peter]

Server mainboards have fast I/O busses, provision for lots of RAM, and fast LAN channels.

 

[Zap]

I have a file server at home, probably something similar to what you have in mind. I use it as extra storage for my Anime collection, accessed from one other machine.

Motherboard = Asus TUV4X (VIA 694T chipset, no onboard video/sound/NIC, obtained used)
CPU = Celeron 1.0A @1.33GHz (obtained used, basic cooling, overkill for a file server)
RAM = 512MB PC133 (used, had it sitting around)
Video = AGP TNT2 m64 (obtained used - for free)
NIC = PCI 3Com 3C905 (obtained used, don't know which revision)
IDE = onboard and a PCI Highpoint RocketRAID133 that I had gotten through a trade, not running RAID
HDD = 40GB boot drive, 3x 200GB and 1x 250GB all on the Highpoint controller
Case = AOpen A600A, Powmax 500W power supply I had sitting around

Not counting the hard drives and case, I have probably invested $100 in the parts for a decent performing file server. Copying to/from the server is about as fast as moving data around the SATA drives in my main machine. I have the drives mapped and if someone sat down at my machine they'd have 1.26TB of data at their fingertips without even knowing they were pulling stuff off a server.

 

[Zap]

Oh yeah, I actually had a point to my post. My point was that probably anything in the 1GHz +/- range with HDD controllers that can handle the most modern hard drives will be sufficient for most purposes. Now, if you are going to have multiple computers pulling data off the server concurrently, then be prepared to spend big bucks on:

Server board with PCI-X/64bit PCI slots
PCI-X/64bit PCI RAID controllers and gigabit ethernet
HDDs to populate a RAID setup, either RAID 0 or 5
network switch with at least one gigabit port