Extreme low power storage server

U

Ulrezaj

Weaksauce
Joined
Nov 29, 2004
Messages
65
I need helping building a very low power storage server. I plan to put freebsd on it and port all my current wintel storage (~10TB) to ZFS on it. My question is, what's the best approach for this? I know there's all sorts of prepackaged nettops that consume on the order of 25W, but I assume they don't have 6 extra SATA ports.

So that being the case, I figure I'll need something like Atom build, though there may be better solutions that I'm unaware of. So, can I get suggestions for a build that consumes ~ <50W? I already have the case, lots of ram lying around, peripherals, and the storage of course, so what I need is:

CPU, motherboard, PSU.

The motherboard needs to have 6+ SATA ports, gigabit ethernet, and on-board graphics. RAID isn't necessary.

I live in Canada but buying from US retailers isn't an issue. There is no budget for this build, though I can't imagine those three components being that much to begin with.

Any suggestions are appreciated!
 
Well, you could always go for an atom powered NAS device like this:

http://www.qnap.com/pro_detail_feature.asp?p_id=145
From the product sheets:
Sleep mode: 22W
In Operation: 43W

If you decide to build yourself, and the nettop motherboard itself doesn't have a bunch of ports, you can always get a PCI-E sata (or raid) card to connect the extra drives. Another thing to keep in mind if you build something yourself is the hard drives themselves, they do consume a bit of power, especially when they are spinning up.
 
How many hard drives will you be using with this server? Which hard drives?

Depending on the number of drives and which drives they are, you've may have already exceeded or gone pretty close to your 50W idle limit with just the drives alone.
 
I just built a server using a 32nm clarksdale i5 650. Very low power especially if you're using the integrated GPU.
 
Ulrezaj said:
They're all WD greenpower 1.5 and 2.0 TB drives, soon to be 6 of them.
Click to expand...

$90 - GIGABYTE GA-D510UD Intel Atom D510 BGA559 Intel NM10 Mini ITX Motherboard/CPU Combo
$100 - SuperMicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 PCI-X (PCI Compatible) 8 Port SATA Controller Card
$50 - Corsair 400CX 400W PSU
$80 - Cooler Master CM690 II ATX Case
--
Total: $320 plus tax and shipping.
 
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