Sunday, February 17, 2008

New hardware for my lil server

I recently ordered new hardware for my little file-serving, downloading and IRCing box. As the nature of this 'server' is to be always on and not demanding powerful hardware, I went for the following components:

  • Intel Celeron 420 (1.6GHz, Single-Core, 35W power-consumption)
  • ASUS P5B-VM Motherboard (5 SATA-ports, GBit ethernet, on-board VGA)
  • Crucial 1GB DDR2-667
The hardware that was being replaced was:
  • Tyan Tiger motherboard
  • 2x Pentium III 1GHz
  • 2x 512MB SD-RAM
  • 2x Adaptec 1210SA
  • 1x Intel 1GBit Ethernet (eepro1000)
  • ATI Radeon 8500
(Note that I currently have the Intel Ethernet adapter still plugged in since network didn't work out of the box and I haven't found the time to fiddle with it, yet).

As you can see this box is optimized on low cost, low power consumption and replacing as many of the old parts as possible. At a total of 136 EUR (the CPU was only 35 EUR!) including shipping, I'm really satisfied. One additional Adaptec controller would've cost 50 EUR and would've added only 2 SATA ports, so this was probably the best solution. I still have 2 SATA ports unused on the mainboard and have 2 SATA-controllers lying around ready to be plugged in if even those will be used up. Finallly I have potential to grow my RAID even bigger. :-)

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