P2P/File sharing built question

[andy04]

I have a Dell 8200 that runs 24x7 for bittorrent and file sharing. It has 2.6 GHz CPU and 512 MB RDRAM. It also has a NVIDIA FX5200 GPU.

I am planning to built a new system where I can use RAID and add more HDDs as the current one has limitations and is also 6 years old and lately it started having problems.

My highest priority is building a system that would consume the lowest amount of Power. I am planning on using onboard Video and sound and using 512 MB of ram.
Will 512 slow donw file sharing ?
CPU - which CPU consumes the lowest amount of power ? - is it possible to built a desktop with laptop components. I need mobo that can support atleast 6 HDDs without addon cards
any other sugessions ?

 

[zephyrprime]

If you want to support so many drive, you can forget about any laptop parts which you couldn't get anyway. If you want the minimum power usage, get a 65nm athlon. Although the conroe isn't really too bad it's not quite as good in the power department.

I'd advise against getting 512gb even though you application is fairly lightweight. A computer like this may last a while so you shouldn't limit yourself too much.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: zephyrprime
If you want to support so many drive, you can forget about any laptop parts which you couldn't get anyway. If you want the minimum power usage, get a 65nm athlon. Although the conroe isn't really too bad it's not quite as good in the power department.

You can also underclock/undervolt 90nm Athlon64s (and probably some Intel CPUs as well.) However, this will obviously slow down the CPU (though I don't know how much CPU/RAM is needed for most filesharing applications. Most Bittorrent clients, in my limited experience with them, are written rather poorly.) As an example, my desktop idles at (I think) 1000Mhz and ~1.0V, and based on mathematical scaling it's probably using no more than 10-15W at that speed. Silent PC Review has some good articles on this.

There are also those VIA CPUs that use like 10W max. Not very fast, but maybe enough for this.

To keep power/heat low: get a motherboard that uses a low-power chipset (look for ones with passive cooling), use a low-power 2.5" laptop SATA drive, use a high-efficiency PSU, and use the slowest and most efficient CPU (and least amount of RAM) that you can get away with.

I'm not sure about the efficiency of onboard SATA controllers versus the ones on add-on cards. It's probably not much of a difference. Also note that depending on how much storage you want, it may use less power overall to use big (but individually more power-hungry) 3.5" SATA drives than a whole bunch of efficient 2.5" laptop drives. And it will definitely be cheaper. An add-in hardware RAID controller may also let you get away with a slower CPU if you want to do RAID5/RAID6 (RAID0/1 takes very little extra CPU time.)

I'd advise against getting 512gb (sic -- probably meant MB, not gb) even though you application is fairly lightweight. A computer like this may last a while so you shouldn't limit yourself too much.

You can always add more memory later. As for whether 512MB is enough -- check the memory usage on the current system. If it's peaking at more than 512MB, then it's not enough for the applications you are running.

And OP, I hope you're not distributing or downloading anything illegal...