What do the gurus think of this (barebones motherboard + Dual-core Atom 330), this case, and a pair of these? Oh, and go whole hog on the memory.
$335.45 for a PC-based fileserver with 2TB of disk, 2GB RAM, and minimal power usage. Put Linux on it and make it an iSCSI target, or use NFS. And Samba gives Windows clients support, too. Maybe you want something like Openfiler?
In an ideal world, I’d spend a bit more and have a machine with a “good” NIC (a high-end Gigabit card), hardware RAID (just basic support is fine), and three or more disks. But this is small and simple. I want to set it in a corner and forget it, and just mirror the drives via software RAID. Thoughts, anyone?
There seem to be quite a few vendors releasing Atom based “home servers” (Acer, for instance: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16859321013). I’ve really been trying to eliminate needless power consumption around our house lately, so to me this makes a lot of sense.