Low Power File Server?

[budec]

Any suggestions on a low power usage file server? (for home, personal use)

The requirements are basically "stick in dual 1 TB SATA HDDs" plus SSD system disk. Needs dual Ethernet (preferable gigabit).

2 gigs of ram would be nice, but not required. Will run FreeBSD or Linux. A dual/quad core would also but nice, but not a requirement.

Besides file serving, I use apache/php/mysql, etc and generic unix services (firewall, nat, dhcpd, ntpd, perl for scripting, imapd (courier-imapd), sshd, fetchmail, procmail, etc)

Currently I'm running dual AMD MPs with 2 gigs of ram, dual 360 gig drives (for storage), dual 80 gigs (for system) [both in raid mirror] with 650 watt psu. It runs beautifully, but wondering if I could save some money on my power bill by going with something newer?

 

[swatbat]

Maybe a mini-itx board(check logic supply as they have a good selection) with a core 2 notebook chip on it. You can get a used chip off ebay and throw it all in a nice small case.

 

[ndruw]

Assuming you aren't going to have an extremely high load, a cheap core 2 and cheaper intel chipset would be your best bet. Onboard RAID wouldn't be necessary since FreeBSD's latest ZFS implementation could take care of it for you. Core 2 Duos have a 65w TDP but it is very rare that you will hit that; they are very well optimized for low power usage environments.

Ram is cheap so spring for 4GB if you do go this route, since ZFS is kinda a ram hog.

 

[Manaknight]

get a cheap am2 board and one of those 35w be2x dual cores. grab yourself the best energy efficient psu you can afford and you will be good to go. That is what i run with 4 sata drives + a boot drive and it runs great. For example i had a power outage here a few days ago, my apc smart ups sua1000 held the server up for hours, which means it wasn't pulling much power at all.