Thanks Abula. These custom solutions are always incredibly expensive for what they are, or have an ARM CPU or non-standard BIOS so you can't easily install your own OS. A little case like the one I linked to, maybe with a single 2.5" bay for an SSD and a 3.5" bay for hard drive. Years ago I had a to...

Found this little box today too:



Unfortunately they have not decided if they are going to release it, but a system like that would be lovely. Passively cooled, Atom CPU, multiple drive bays. A 3.5" bay would be nice.

Another interesting board: https://www.supermicro.co.uk/products/motherboard/Atom/X10/A1SA7-2750F.cfm The A1SA7-2750F has an LSI RAID controller with 16x SATA3 ports on board. Couldn't find any info on power consumption, but it is Atom based (quad core with AES support). Unfortunately as well as bei...

Abula wrote:As i said earlier, vitkonic also has setups with Asrock as his motherboards idling between 11-13W, so i think you have some good options around.

I prefer Asrock boards. Never had good experiences with MSI, although that was years ago, but Asrock are usually solid.

This looks interesting: http://www.kitguru.net/components/motherboard/faith/msi-highlights-the-green-way-with-h97m-eco-demo-at-computex/ 15W with a Core i7 and fairly average power supply. Moving to a high efficiency DC PSU and a more efficient CPU could get down to 10W or so I think. Even 15W would...

Abula wrote:Because motherboards usually don't come with more than 6 sata ports. Most just use Raid cards like IBM M1015 or Dell Perc5 and flash them to IT firmware and use them as plain sata ports.

Sure, to clarify I was talking about using them in hardware RAID mode, where drives can't spin down.

washu wrote:

MoJo wrote: Simple, if you have the following requirements:

- RAID 5/6
- Runs Windows
- More than 6 disks
- Perform well

Windows 8 Storage Spaces does support RAID 5, and performance is pretty good. Good enough for NAS, certainly. But yes, with Windows 7 you are stuffed.

Ah yes, hardware RAID controllers. Not really built for low power operation. But why is anyone here bothering to use them? Apart from power consumption they tie you to that particular RAID system, where as a simple software RAID is fully portable. A single HDD can saturate a gigabit ethernet connect...

Do people really have such a huge problem sleeping their HDDs? I just enabled the option in Windows and it worked, on multiple machines. Are there problems with certain motherboards or chipsets or something?

I'll be back in Japan in September so I was planning on waiting until then to buy anything. As well as the excellent exchange rate making it all much cheaper, the selection in the UK is pathetic. The only thing I will get here is a case. I prefer to buy in person rather than over the internet. That ...

Thanks. I feel like such a n00b, and I've only been out of the game for a few years.

Anyone know if H81 is good for low power? It seems to be a bit new and there is not much information on its low power credentials. Boards are coming out just now for it, e.g.http://www.biostar.com.tw/app/m/mb/intr ... p?S_ID=693

Thanks for the links, some interesting reading. Probably the B85 would be the safest pick as vitconik has one in his signature and getting 14W idle, so fits the range you are looking, not sure the other two, probably the Z87 will be less efficient with the VRMs oriented to overclocking. Yeah, despit...

I've bought two Microservers. FYI, the second one has significantly higher power consumption according to my UPS. So yeah, I suspect the first Microservers had more efficient power supplys. MoJo, waking up a server from standby with WoL is fast as well. If you don't mind waiting for the drives to s...

Just one additional point -- TrueCrypt has been completely abandoned (by its anonymous developers), and the suspicion is that this is because it is compromised. If you are using Windows, have you checked out Bitlocker? In fact, with Bitlocker, you can buy drives that are certified to a certain stan...

So, are you saying you get about 35W with the drives spinning? I get that with all but one of them powered down. I've said this before but I think HP gave you a much better PSU than the ones that shipped later. I'm on 240V so if identical mine should be even more efficient. I wonder if it is worth ...

I too have an old 160GB XM-25 I was thinking about re-purposing. Funnily enough, that is *exactly* the drive that I have in my DQ77KB system! My original one wore out in about 18 months. The Intel app said it ran out of spare write capacity, so I had it replaced under warranty. In the mean time I b...

OK, I have to admit, I have never tried to get the HDDs to spin down. This means too long a delay when responding to a request out of idle -- regardless of the rest of the hardware. Our Microserver never sleeps and its drives never spin down. Response time to virtually any request any time, however...

For what it's worth, we've been running our sample of the HP Microserver (AMD Turion based) as SPCR's data storage server and home server for me since we reviewed it years ago. It holds some 10-12 TB of data & is used constantly for downloads, serving data, music, video, etc. It's been amazingly re...

I think you will really struggle, and it will cost you a lot of money (way more than the ~15W power savings will ever give you back). I have an Intel DQ77KB motherboard with Intel Xeon E3-1265L v2, and with an ancient Intel SSD (i.e. not the most power-efficient) running Windows 8, it idles at 13W ...

CA_Steve wrote:The J series chips don't support AES-NI.

Sure, that's why I rejected it, I was just speculating... Would be an interesting trend.

Thanks. I appreciate 10W is a hard goal to hit, but I'd be very happy with 15W or less. The machine will be headless, the only connection being LAN and a few USB devices that I'm not including in the power budget. I wish staggered spin-up for HDDs was available so I could use a smaller brick. I noti...

Now on your AES need, i think i3 and higher support it, so maybe something like Intel Core i3-4130 Haswell Dual-Core 3.4GHz LGA 1150 54W Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 4400 BX80646I34130 + ASRock Z87E-ITX LGA 1150 Intel Z87 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 Mini ITX Intel I217V Lan 802.11ac WiFi Intel M...

Thanks for the information guys. I wasn't aware that Intel are giving up on mobos, and such a lot has changed since I really looked into this years ago and bought the HP Microserver. So the consensus seems to be that Intel is the way to go here, and it really boils down to what boards are available....

CA_Steve wrote:This Bay Trail thread might be of interest.

Thanks, I'll read through it.

If you are aiming at this low state, you need to move into intel and research a good motherboard in terms of power consumption, and defently need a PicoPSU for it to achive this low power. You will need the OS drive to be either an SSD or 2.5 laptop hdd, a desktop hdd can take up to 10W on active.....

Hi. I have an HP MicroServer with a crappy Turion processor. Like many I was suckered in by the claims that it was quiet and low power, but it is neither. I'm not too bothered about noise, but it idles around 35W with all but one HDD spun down. I already disabled everything I can in the BIOS etc. Th...

The ML110 is rather nice but also costs more than twice as much as the MicroServer. It is also much larger.

The stock 7970 is pretty quiet in an Antec P180. I'm not sure I'm even going to bother modding it.