Hardware Recommendations for a New User

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enlox
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Location: Sweden
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Re: Hardware Recommendations for a New User

Postby enlox » Tue Sep 07, 2010 6:19 am

so i now have my hardware in place and have started to install my Amahi system. there are some changes to the hardware list...

case: Fractal Design Array Mini ITX an awesome looking little case with room for 1x2,5" and 6x3,5" HDD. Could not have asked for more!
Image

motherboard: Gigabyte D510UD with Atom D510 and 2 GB DDR2-667 (Corsair VS)

hard drives: one 160GB 2,5" Seagate Momentus, one 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F3, one 750GB Samsung Spinpoint F1, one 500GB Samsung Spinpoint F1

expansion possibilities: PCI controller for more SATA drives, there is room for 3 more. there is room for 2GB more of RAM, if needed.

i hope to have this system up and running the way i want it by the end of this week.
http://www.enlox.com (swedish personal blog)

hfl
Posts: 18
Joined: Sun Oct 31, 2010 3:53 pm

Comments on hw specification?

Postby hfl » Sun Oct 31, 2010 4:07 pm

I would like to build myself a Amahi server. I am not a Linux guru and am not sa ystems expert, therefore I would like to share my thoughts about the system build in the hope that one of you experts could review and comment?

From building an appliance I hope to learn and to get an appliance that is flexible, without loosing (too much) what a special-purpose build commercial product offers, e.g. Synology (DS209) or QNAP (TS-219P).

Being based in France I find the choice of system components somewhat limited:

80 Euros - Case & PSU: SmartTeck Boîtier CUBE EZPlug mini-ITX, 200W. I could not find a smaller enclosure for 2x 3.5" HDD (smaller enclosures appear to favour 2.5" HDD), and 200W here may be too powerful? The hot-swapable disk racks may be interesting some time in the future (but not in the short-run because I do not plan using RAID 1). I read conflicting reviews about the noise coming from the case fans but presume some fans could be disconnected and/or speed reduced to 7V?

73 Euros - MB & CPU ASRock A330GC - Atom 330 (Intel 945GC Express) - Mini ITX. This was the only board I found well under 100 Euros that has 2x SATA plus an additional port (here IDE) for a CD drive (cherry on the cake where the enclosure has space for it). Another cherry is that I have a spare pair of DDR2-533 512MB RAM (yes, 1x stick would be a little bit better for power consumption). On the compromise-side I don't like the small fan (source of noise) on the Northbridge but presume this fan could be disconnected – either leaving it with just the radiator block or buying a passiv heatsink (Zalman)? Guess low power consumption of this board is not that great but are other mini-ITX mainboards in that price range so much different? Related to power consumption may be the CPU could be underclocked?

20 Euros - Adapter USB header/port, and USB stick - I wonder if it is possible to install (from the CD drive that is connected permanently or temporarily) Fedora with Amahi into a 8GB SD-Card that I currently have spare? The SD Card would be in a USB stick connected to an internal USB header. Is 8GB enough? Would this work?

Any comments appreciated, thank you very much in advance.

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rgmhtt
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Re: Hardware Recommendations for a New User

Postby rgmhtt » Sun Oct 31, 2010 8:21 pm

Mini ITX boxes are NOT cheap. The price for them has NOT come down in the past year. This is why I get used SFF boxes. Twice as big and 3x the power demand, but 1/2 the price. Oh, and typically twice as fast.

I get mine from ebay. I don't know what your options would be in France.

jcmorris
Posts: 5
Joined: Tue Dec 14, 2010 5:38 pm

Re: Hardware Recommendations for a New User

Postby jcmorris » Tue Jun 21, 2011 3:10 pm

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product

I used one of these, faster than a atom and cheaper. 99.00 U.S. after rebate from NewEgg and only 18 watts of power.

rbmattis
Posts: 100
Joined: Fri Mar 18, 2011 8:37 am

Re: Hardware Recommendations for a New User

Postby rbmattis » Thu Jun 30, 2011 9:51 pm

I built a custom box out of a pentium 4... worked fine, but darn if that thing didn't raise my power bill by ~15 per month (NYC power prices are high).

I bought this HP Proliant microserver:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product

On sale for $255...sips power, nearly silent, fast enough to handle most normal loads (I doubt it will transcode 720p on the fly).

DragonQ
Posts: 44
Joined: Wed Sep 21, 2011 1:28 am

Re: Hardware Recommendations for a New User

Postby DragonQ » Thu Sep 29, 2011 8:11 am

I chose an AMD E-350 for low power usage. £190 up front for this hardware (minus the HDDs, already had those):

- £104: Asus E35M1-M Pro (fanless, 6 SATA ports and good number of expansion options)
- £45: Huntkey Jumper 300G (high efficiency even at 10% power draw, which is what I'm using)
- £30: Xigmatek Asgard (big case so lots of space for HDDs and airflow isn't a problem)
- £11: 2 GB of Kingston 1333 MHz RAM

At ~35 W power usage (barely even goes up when accessing the disks), it'll only cost me ~£3.20 per month to run! Hopefully I can get the power usage down further by undervolting the CPU, which I might try this weekend. A lot better than my old plan of leaving my desktop on for two weeks in case I needed to remotely access a file, using 150 W when idle which'd cost nearly £14 per month! It's also really quiet since it only has two fans in total - one intake fan by the HDDs running at low RPM and the PSU fan as an exhaust.

Overall I'm very pleased with the setup, although I would advise people that Asus Zacate motherboards do have a few problems. For example, this model doesn't like one of my mice and it also has no Linux drivers so you're stuck with standard ones. Other manufacturers might be better but the choice if you want a fanless CPU is rather narrow.

Basically, it seems to me that the only thing this setup can't handle too well is encoding. So, if you don't want an encoding server, I can't see any point in getting a more powerful (and more power-hungry) CPU than a Zacate. The Intel option is Atom but Zacate is better in pretty much every benchmark, since it's newer.

msstatecoletrain
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Joined: Thu Jan 24, 2013 7:18 am

Re: Hardware Recommendations for a New User

Postby msstatecoletrain » Tue Sep 24, 2013 2:00 pm

any updated hardware suggestions for new user of amahi 7???

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bigfoot65
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Re: Hardware Recommendations for a New User

Postby bigfoot65 » Tue Sep 24, 2013 2:06 pm

Anything will work as long as you meet or exceed these requirements as listed in the wiki.

https://wiki.amahi.org/index.php/Requirements

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ßîgƒσστ65
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My HDA: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3570K CPU @ 3.40GHz on MSI board, 16GB RAM, 1TBx1+2TBx2+4TBx2

elinstech
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Joined: Thu Sep 26, 2013 7:57 pm

Re: Hardware Recommendations for a New User

Postby elinstech » Thu Sep 26, 2013 8:00 pm

e-lins.com/EN/- Another site I have not used, but they have great prices and good reviews too.

wgais9708
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Re: Hardware Recommendations for a New User

Postby wgais9708 » Sun Jan 26, 2014 1:09 pm

I use my server for file sharing, backup, and occasional streaming. I'm still running my Amahi on an old Dell Dimension. It runs fine, but is limited to 32 bit. I've been shopping around for a replacement, and have found a mini itx with an Atom S1260.

The S1260 is a dedicated server cpu for cloud storage, so I'm not too sure how it would work with Amahi on a home network. It's relatively cheap, has a good feature set that includes virtualization, and one of the lowest power demands I've seen. Does anyone have experience with this processor? Can you tell me if this would work as a home server?

Also, I'm not too savvy about processors, but I was intrigued by the idea of a system on a chip. Can you tell me what that means for a typical home server such as Amahi?

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