Building Server for Home - Hardware recommendations.

[SibLiant]

Hello all,

I'm getting ready to build a debian server for home. I won't be running x so i don't need a great vid card but I would like onboard raid and lots of sata ports. It's primary function will be a file server but I'll be running some other misc stuff on it also (probably subversion, bind, and a mail server eventually)

I would love to hear some hardware opinions from the community. I'm just leaning linux and have learned to research my hardware as much as possible before I make that purchase.

Link resources that you all use to research compatibility would be great or some mobos you guys are using or like. Thanks!

[coopstah13]

Newegg.com - Computer Parts, PC Components, Laptop Computers, Digital Cameras and more!

[bidi]

I got all my stuff from Newegg (as suggested above) for my latest setup.

I used an AMD Athlon LE-1600 (I think it's a Sempron core though, that's what /proc/cpuinfo says) which has a 45W rating and can be turned down to 1.0GHz for ultimate power savings with powernowd. The motherboard is an ASUS with 10/100/1000 LAN, onboard video (it has VGA and DVI output, I don't either), and support for 4 SATA2 HDs.

In my opinion, unless you're really serious about this server I would do away with the RAID setup. I just use a single 500GB HD with a 200GB for back-ups. I only mount the 200GB HD once a week for the back-ups, the rest of the time it's saving on energy (every little counts) and reducing the possibility of failure.

I'm all about saving energy (since it costs money and all), so I picked a setup which would optimize that. I would have gone with an even better setup if I really tried, but this whole setup cost me less than $500 (I already had the HDs though).

[SibLiant]

Thanks for the specs. I'll check it out.

I suppose saving some money without going raid and mounting the drive when I need it is probably a better solution all around. I didn't consider that... hmm.

[coopstah13]

I agree here, raid isn't very necessary for home file storage uses. I recently bought a system for $350 from newegg that had 6 SATA slots, but like the previous person I already owned the hard drives