Considering the Acer RevoCenter (Atom D510) for an HDA

[jonathankonrad]

I'm thinking about a new HDA. I've come across an Acer RevoCenter for a good price. I have not purchased it yet, but I'm close. Would this system make a good Amahi home server? I currently run my HDA on a very old Core 2 Duo @ 1.8 with 2GBs of RAM. This would not really be a hardware improvement with a weaker CPU (Atom D510), but the case is so much better. For hot swap drive bays and a much smaller watt footprint.

Has anyone used the atom D510 as an HDA? Are the results good? Thanks for any feedback.

[apastor]

I had the AMD equivalent to intel atom's CPU in my server. It appeared to do the job, but there was a slight load when idling. Also my network speeds were about 20-30MB/sec

I upgraded to a AMD PHENON quad core shortly afterwards. Now the server hums along very nicely.

My active apps are (that I can remember)..

transmission
sickbeard
couchpotato
minidlna

I think With the atom CPU you will have a performance hit because of the CPU, but if you OK with that, then go for it. Also how many users will be accessing it, and how what apps do you plan on running on it.

I would suggest to get a server with a better processor if you will have a lot of users and running lots of apps.

But a few users and a few apps, should be alright.

Keep us informed.

[rjwaldren]

I'm running amahi on a Intel D510MO board. The main problems that I have with the atom based boards are:

1. Most use a Realtek NIC, that requires realtek drivers if you want decent gig performance.
2. Lack of SATA ports, unless you go for the supermicro boards.
3. Most only have a PCI slot, so multiport sata or raid cards are handicapped right from the start.

That said I have been very happy with performance, transcoding HD content on the fly is no problem.

[jonathankonrad]

Well the box is a home server box. Designed for WHS. It mentions eSATA but I doubt it support port multiplication. I can't seem to find out information specifically about the board in this thing. This is the only link I have

http://www.acer.ca/ac/en/CA/content/model/PG.T1B0W.002

I'm very curious about your comment on transcoding HD content on the fly. Which program are you using for that? Thank you.

[rjwaldren]

PS3media server, Servio...There's also a patch for miniDLNA (Amahi-DLNA) that I hope to play with soon. MiniDLNA is my favorite DLNA server for most purposes.

Edit... My samsung plays nearly everything on it's own, so some of the "transcoding" is really just remuxing into a supported container format.

[jonathankonrad]

Cool. I actually had no idea that miniDLNA was actually transcoding the media. I thought is was just sort of "publishing" it so other devices could find it. I actually use Amahi-DLNA and a samsung Blu ray player to watch a lot of media. So it's great to hear that the Atom D510 could continue to do this for me.

Thanks. If they still have this in stock I think I'll buy it tomorrow. Then if anyone wants, I'll publish my results with it.

[rjwaldren]

Amahi-DLNA is doesn't transcode, your first thoughts were correct. The amahi-dlna one-click is 12 code releases behind minidlna, in addition to that there is a third party patch that adds dev transcoding support.


Correction, cpg has updated to 1.0.16.2 since I last looked. Current mini-dlna is 1.0.21.

[jonathankonrad]

So, I picked it up and it may yet work out. And good instructions of a completely headless system. I mean it has no video port at all, so the install has to be automatic too.

Thanks for any tips.

[JennyJones]

Mine is working well no problems at all

[halgorithm]

Mine is working well no problems at all

I just bought the RevoCenter D510 and moving from WHS because it never worked out of the box for me. I had no idea that there was a distro for this specific purpose so I'm really excited to get it up and running.

How do you go about installing this while the RevoCenter has no video or cdrom? Yes, I know about diskless systems, but you have to push a few keys on the keyboard and without ESP you're not sure what prompt your install may be at... Is there a tutorial on installing Amahi on a system like this?

I've tried YUMI (didn't work; install couldn't see source or destination) and then burned a disk to install via another system with SATA ports (in which the installer failed to pick up, I think they are marvel sata) to a ssd I'm tossing in the bottom. Can't install from windows to external and use fs ext4, as far as I'm aware...?

I'm this close to running to the store to get a pci express vid card, but I wanted to see what others were doing or other methods of installing. Before I break down and get a vid card, what would happen to Amahi if I installed it from another barebones system and then moved the drive over to the Revo after the fact? Would it mess up the hardware detection to the boot? Will I even see it on the network after it boots (because despite how much linux has made advances, there are issues with nic drivers from time to time...

EDIT: Nevermind - found the other treads and frankly, sounds a bit more convoluted than something I wanted to do this weekend. It's not about the device being headless, but the onboard NIC sounds like it has some issues so without a USB NIC, there is going to be issues doing this setup on this device.