I think that You would do just fine with a VIA Epia -based system. Or a Tualatin-based, but You'd have to find some second-hand parts.

Cheers,

Jan

A file server has to do very little deep thinking (but you intend to fold as well, of course). The bottleneck is going to be Ethernet at max. 12 MBps (megabytes). Consider that most NAS has wimpier CPUs.

The Epia-M series has two IDE and one floppy connector. The older ones (533 MHz and 800 MHz) has no floppy connectors. The Matrox can come in useful, the sound and ethernet can be eBayed. Nehemiah supposedly has a full speed FPU, so should be better at folding (my Ezra core 800 MHz really sucks at CPU intensive work).

Quite right: any of the processors mentioned here would do fine.
In fact, any processor that works in a board new enough to have ATA100 or better will be fine.

That old small drive: if it shares an IDE bus with the main drive, aren't they both limited to the speed of the slower drive? If that's the way it works then you might be better off without it.

If this thing's a file server, what's your way to back up the data?

Looking over the hardware you do have, I noticed you have a 10/100 mbit network card. Since this is a network file server (I'm assuming), you're not even going to come close to maximizing the throughput of the hard drive.

You'd have to upgrade your network to fiber optics or gigabit ethernet or something of the likes to even come remotely close. Otherwise, the real-world throughput of a 100 mbit per second network connection is somewhere around ~9 megabytes a second due to network overhead and other "traffic". For reference, most modern hard drives can sustain transfer rates around 40-50 megabytes a second, with some SCSI drives hitting well into the 70 megabyte per second range--enough to even saturate a gigabit ethernet.


So, my reccomendation to you is to focus on getting any stable board that supports either sata or ATA100 and up. Either one is going to have enough "speed" to satisfy your requirements with little trouble.






Again, you're going to get speed that on the vast majority of networks you won't be able to use. If you upgraded to a gigabit network, it may be worth it, but otherwise you'd just be paying money to get a fast, noisy drive that you'll probably never make use of. I'd highly reccomend you stick with less performance oriented drives, since you're not going to see a huge benefit (probably zilch) by going with a raptor. Save your $$$, upgrade to gigabit network.

It's akin to buying a ferrari to go to the supermarket and buy groceries.


Currently, my network runs at 100 mbit (soon to be 1000 ), and I have a Seagate IV on an intel 440bx motherboard running at ata33. The bottleneck is the network, by a long, long shot.




1. Buy a very low power processor and video card.
2. Get a good power supply (seasonic is my advised unit)
3. Get a good UPS.
4. Keep in mind the various bottlenecks you're going to encounter--most likely it's going to be the actual network, not the computer. My "server" is a P2-400, and it's more than capable of flooding my network. Things will change when I go to gigabit, but for the time being I have to work within those limitations.
5. No sound card, keyboard, mouse, monitor, or any of that crap. Go headless if at all possible.


Good luck.

If you're not 100% tied to Newegg, you might consider Lian-Li's PC-30 and PC-50 series cases. They're not cheap, but the quality is high. You should also see Bluefront's barebones post.

If I were you, I'd forget about all of those PCI cards and use onboard with the new mobo. For AMD, an nforce board should do nicely. Ditch that 8gb WD too.