mITX, 4 SATA, low power mobile support?

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MrFoof

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Dec 2, 2007
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Been googling, haven't found too much, so I figure I come here.

Here's the project. Ripping DVDs. H.264 encoding so I can just keep them all in a box in the closet. Media is consumed by a computer, iPhone, and eventually a TV (through some sort of media extender). Lots of storage. Ideally low-power. An OEM WHS box would probably cut it, but there's no fun in that. So I'm looking to build something, whether it runs WHS, Linux or whatever.

So looking for the following:
  • 4 Serial ATA ports
  • Gigabit ethernet, though nothing wrong with a single expansion slot for future wireless
  • Supports low-power mobile processors - LV or ULV chips being ideal
  • No frills. If it's not needed, it's a waste of money and electricity.
I figure a single disk (WD RE2-GP) sucks 7.4W at 100% efficiency under load. Or 9.2 - 9.3W with a power supply running at 80% efficiency. So I'm looking at 36-40W at the wall while the I/O subsystem is under peak load. 20W at idle. Ideally I'd like to keep the rest of the system running lean. I want this to be an appliance, not a computer. Shooting for ~35W at idle, ~55W under load. Less is better. Outside of the disks we're looking at powering the motherboard, an RJ-45 port, possibly an SATA backplane, a single DIMM.

Looking for ideas. Thanks in advance.
 
This miniPCI card adds 2xSATA ports, which would make any miniITX board that support Merom work.

Closest I can find to the specs you are looking for: http://www.bwi.com/search

This has 3xSATA ports, but you could add an additional drive through a interal USB connector or via Firewire. If you are using laptop drives, USB 2.0 would be enough bandwidth for one or two.

There is only one mITX board that I am aware of with 4xSATA (Commell LV-678) and it only supports regular C2Ds.

However, what you really should have is a power hungry GPU to assist with H.264 encoding.

If you want to look at other mITX boards, see www.logicsupply.com, store.mp3car.com, www.mini-box.com, www.bwi.com
 
Don't need a power-hungry CPU. This is basically a NAS device. This device isn't ripping the DVDs (I have a C2D to do that, which will eventually be a Quad), it's just tons and tons of general storage (four 1TB disks being likely, which also rules out laptop drives).

For the time being all my video is stored between two 500GB drives, eating only about 680GB of space encoded, and I pick up new content at a pretty slow pace... figure a season of an hour-long show is about 12GB, a season of a half-hour long show is about 6GB, and a movie is 1 - 1.5GB. I just figure that my collection is going to continue to grow, and I don't want a computer on 24/7 that's eating 110W at idle to feed a media extender (120W if it had two more disks). Looking to cut 80-90W of idle power consumption (which is ~$130/year savings here), more with intelligent low-power state support, while having something I can hide away that's small, silent, and just does its job.

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Komtron has a board with 4x SATA, a compact flash socket (great for the OS itself), hardware RAID support, supports Merom and Yonah, and Gigabit. They even offer one with a BGA ULV CeleronM 423 (1.06GHz) with a 5.5W TDP. It has some crap I don't need though (three network adapters instead of 1, audio, legacy crap such as RS-232 and PS/2). So far, not bad, and the sort of thing I'm looking for: http://us.kontron.com/index.php?id=226&cat=528&productid=1336
 
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