Cheap PC for Storage

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Odom

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Hi all

Looking to build a really cheap (Budget of R2500 - R3000) PC for storage of movies/iso's/music. Basically all I need is a a mobo, cpu, some ram and about 1TB - 2TB worth of storage space. Nothing fancy, just something cheap and reliable. I do however want a mobo that can support at least 4 sata drives at once.

I have been toying with the idea of a fan-less setup by getting a large enough heat-sink for the CPU but I'm not sure if it would work.

Anyone got any suggestions?
 
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Another option would be a Atom 330 based mini-ITX board. Just check the amount of sata ports (or you could add a sata card for more) and the LAN speed. Provides a low power fanless option.

www.mini-box.co.za The two intel board they list have GbEth LAN, 3xSata, 1x eSata, 1xPCI (can add a multiport sata card) plus the usual USB etc

Also check Sybaritic & Prophecy.
 
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for the OS you can look at FreeNAS, I have enjoyed that.

PC requirements are bare minimum, i was running it on a P4 2.4GHZ with 1GB DDR2, el cheepo raid card, 4 320GB Drices and 2 x 1GB Ethernet Cards.

Kept all my music, movies, pictures, etc.

Worked like a charm and never had problems, considering the hardware was ancient that was a big suprise and performance over the LAN was great.
 
ponder said:
Another option would be a Atom 330 based mini-ITX board. Just check the amount of sata ports (or you could add a sata card for more) and the LAN speed. Provides a low power fanless option.

www.mini-box.co.za The two intel board they list have GbEth LAN, 3xSata, 1x eSata, 1xPCI (can add a multiport sata card) plus the usual USB etc

Also check Sybaritic & Prophecy.
Click to expand...

The mini-box site does look nice but I was actually aiming at just a normal computer but using a very basic CPU and Mobo.

Was thinking an LE series Athlon CPU and a cheapy mobo to go with it. Just having a look an Asus M2N68 AM would seem to be my best bet at a mobo as it has everything I want. Would it be possible to cool that setup just using a heat sink and without a fan?
 
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Ubuntu 9.10 would work great as the OS. More user friendly that freenas and has better hardware compatibility and gigabit performance.

Atom 330 should do fine. But hard disk performance will suffer through a PCI RAID card. will top out at about 40mb/s. PCI-E RAID card will top out at 250Mb/s

I would look at E3300 Celeron CPU
2GB RAM stick

and a motherboard like this one:
Asus P5QPL-AM ; all-in-one lga775 mb , support intel Core2 / Core2-Extreme / P4 / Penitum-D , intel G41 + iCH7 chipset , 1333/1066/800 fsb , 2x DDR2 1066(oc)/800/667 , 4 x s-ata2 ; 1 x parallel ata , on-board GMA X4500 VGA with HW MPEG2 + 5.1 audio + gigabit lan ; 2x pci , 1 x pci-e(1x) , 1 x pci-e(16x) , with com/serial + parallel port , with Turbo key - micro atx
 
Thanks so far for the replies all.

@ Sapphiron

I'm currently looking at an AMD solution as I thought it would work out cheaper and quieter. Will an Intel setup trump it?
 
Have a look at this:

Intel 945GCLF2 Little Falls 2 , all-in-one , Integrated Intel Atom330 Dual core cpu ( 1.6Ghz , 533mhz fsb , 1mb L2 cache ) ; intel Core2 / P4 / Pentium D / celeron , 1066/800/533 mhz FSB ; intel 945GC + iCH7 chipset , 1x DDR2 667 , 2 x s-ata2 , 1 x parallel ata133 , on-board GMA 950 VGA , gigabit lan , 4.0 audio + 1xserial + 1x parallel ; 1x pci , no pci-e(16x) , with com/serial + parallel port , mini-iTX / micro-atx
Click to expand...

±R870

Put that in a nice Lian-Li cube chassis with 1GB DDR2-667 and 2 x 1TB. :D
 
How much does that Lian-Li cube case retail for, was looking at a few of the other Lian-Li cases and they're quite pricey.

In terms of 1TB hdd's which brand should I go for or are they all pretty much the same now days in terms of reliability. I recall at first release a lot of the 1TB's released by Seagate failed after a while. Don't want to sound paranoid but I don't wanna have that happen.

Before you ask tho I have considered raid but adding a decent raid controller would probably take me over budget :P
 
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Odom said:
How much does that Lian-Li cube case retail for, was looking at a few of the other Lian-Li cases and they're quite pricey.

In terms of 1TB hdd's which brand should I go for or are they all pretty much the same now days in terms of reliability. I recall at first release a lot of the 1TB's released by Seagate failed after a while. Don't want to sound paranoid but I don't wanna have that happen.

Before you ask tho I have considered raid but adding a decent raid controller would probably take me over budget :P
Click to expand...

±R1120 for the Lian-Li...

Or you could look at something like this or this, m-ATX chassis, for ±R300. Then you could get a bigger mobo with more expansion availability.

I would go for the Seagate 5900RPM LP drives, 1TBs go for ±R800 and they're great.
 
By the way, the new Seagate drives (LP and 7200.12) are 100%. It was some (lots) of the older 7200.11s that were problematic.
 
look for these cheap handle cases, they can take a load of hdd's.
ermmm also check www.pcint.co.za for pricing.
Stay away from seagate. (I know they might have fixed their issues, but i still don't trust them.)
:)
 
Just get a cheap case + PSU from the likes of pc-int or SonicInformed. You most likely won't need rock solid voltage levels or a massive power requirement so a generic 300-400W will cut it. The big brand cases are sweet, but then they don't usually come with a PSU. If you must have brand name then have a look at the Coolermaster RC-330 (Elite 330) which comes with a 350W PSU. It's a mid-tower and not mini-tower, iirc, but that just offers future expansion.
 
Odom said:
Thanks so far for the replies all.

@ Sapphiron

I'm currently looking at an AMD solution as I thought it would work out cheaper and quieter. Will an Intel setup trump it?
Click to expand...

Noise these days are about the same with stock coolers. The intel Motherboards tend to be cheaper making up for the more expensive CPU.

I got no problems with the AMD, but if you go AMD, you really need to buy a Athlon Dual Core or Athlon Quad for them to outperform a similar price Intel.

At the bottom end, intel Celeron's (dual core ones) trump single core AMD semprons
 
spiderz said:
look for these cheap handle cases, they can take a load of hdd's.
ermmm also check www.pcint.co.za for pricing.
Stay away from seagate. (I know they might have fixed their issues, but i still don't trust them.)
:)
Click to expand...

PC Int always a good place to reference prices. There service for me has always been excellent.

Why not drop them an email with your "wish-list"? ;)
 
Avoid Semprons.

However, sure the Intel trumps the AMD in benchmarks, but for day to day use you won't notice the difference. One gets very tired of hearing of comparisons made based on benchmarks which people will never run day to day. If you are living your life running benchmarks from day to day then you got problems.

For this type of PC pick the cheapest thing. If you can get the AMD dual core for less than the Intel then take it. If you can get the Intel cheaper then take it.
 
Software

On the question of software there really is only 2 options, FreeNAS or Openfiler.
Both has their strengths and weakneses.
FreeNAS. – Probably easier to setup than Openfiler. Supports all of the big protocols. But the biggest drawback is that because it is BSD based the access speed of SMB (windows shares) is a lot slower than Openfiler.
But for a novice this might be the better option as there is good documentation out there.
Openfiler. – It is a lot more involved than FreeNAS and can be a real nightmare to get working the way you want it to. Especially hen it comes to Windows shares and LDAP/Active directory integration. But once you understand the principals behind it, it had some very nice functionality.
Why install Ubuntu etc to do a file sharing functionality that these appliances can do automatically, and is easier to manage and maintain.
 
OpenFiler is really cool. I use it quite a bit and found it to be better than FreeNAS,
 
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