My good old home server died. This 7 years old machine that I stacked with hard drives was happily running Windows Home Server and few more things on the top for little more than a year.
But just last week some capacitors on main board blew and it was time to find a substitute.
I quickly decided I need brand new machine I could trust. This were requirements for components:
- Case with enough space for 3.5” drives that can be mounted without screws, can be ugly, nobody will see it.
- Low energy consumption CPU, possibly dual core for extra power for occasionally building of my software, network video rendering and some light web hosting-
- Motherboard with onboard graphics card and gigabit Ethernet, since I rewired home network with gigabit lan (man, it flies!).
- Heat and loudness is not something I’m concerned about, since machine will be in the basement - far from anyone to hear it and where is cold enough.
- 2 GB RAM so I can start extra virtual machine if needed-
- 1 TB of disk space to add to my current ~2 TB array of drives-
- Cheap.
- On stock.
This is what I came up with:
- Case: Cooler Master Elite RC-331 – 31.90 EUR
- Simple and cheap, but with quite intelligent system for locking drives.
- Power Supply Unit: be quite! Straight power 350W – 41.90 EUR
- It’s rated “80 plus”, has lots of power cables for drives and I don’t need anything more than 300W.
- Motherboard: ASUS M3N78 motherboard – 62.90 EUR
- Probably little over the top, but I it was on sale.
- CPU: AMD Athlon 64 X2 5050e – 59.90 EUR
- As suggested by coworker, low consumption, more than enough performance.
- RAM: 2x1GB Kingston ValueRAM DDR2-800 – 30.20 EUR
- Trustworthy brand, but cheap-
- Hard drive: Western Digital Caviar 1TB – 89.90 EUR
- What a price for 1 TB of space! I want more! :)
- Cooling: none
- Stock fan that came with CPU, no need for anything more.
- Optical drive: none
- I’ll just pull SATA DVD-ROM from my main machine to do install, from then on I don’t need it.
Total cost: ~320 EUR
I’ll add 2 x 500GB WD and 2 x 240 WD ATA drives joined in RAID0 on FastTrack TX2000 controller from old machine and drop other smaller disks.
I’ll reuse Windows Home Server OEM from old machine.
Update: It’s up and running. I’ll move data from old drives over the night and it’s all set!