Mini-ITX based Home Server: Planning and Hardware //at 01:39 //by abe

Ever since my former desktop machine gsa died and I started using only laptops at home, I noticed a need for a home server for storing all my MP3s, holiday pictures, games, and backups of my other machines. And I also want a filtering web proxy at home again.

Current situation

Currently my Norhtec MicroClient Jr. “c2” with it’s 120 GB 2.5" harddisk does some of these jobs (mostly storage and backup), but it neither has the disk space nor the performance to do all the things I want.

For storage I once bought a TheCus N4100, the big brother of the popular and officially Debian supported N2100. Unfortunately there are a few things different than in the N2100 (NIC without MAC) which makes it much more difficult to get Debian on it and the original firmware doesn’t support NFS at all. *grmpf* I had hints from others who managed to get Debian on this NAS, but I didn’t find the time and leisure to really dig into cross-compiling kernels. (Although with the new 1.3.06 firmware, so called modules became possible also for the N4100 and a SSH module has been posted with which a Debian chroot could be installed and the required kernel build on the machine itself.)

I though wasn’t very angry when the N4100+ came out shortly after I bought the N4100, because the N4100+ was no more an ARM based device but had a Celeron processor inside instead. And a NAS which is built on average PC hardware wasn’t as appealing as some device based on some more exotic architecture mainly used in embedded devices. :-)

The Mini-ITX Appeal

This view changed rapidly, when Raffzahn showed me a few Mini-ITX boards and cases. I surfed around on Mini-ITX.com store and stumbled upon the NAS-like ES34069 case from Chenbro featuring four S-ATA hotswap 3.5" slots, a slim-line CD-ROM drive slot, a SD card reader, and enough space for an additional 2.5" hard disk and a low profile Mini-ITX board.

Additionally, the VIA EPIA SN series of Mini-ITX boards sports 4 S-ATA ports and either a passively cooled 1 GHz C7 processor or an actively cooled 1.8 GHz C7 processor. That should be enough power for a small multi-purpose home server while still keep the power consumption low. And I’m not the only one having this idea, Mini-ITX.com suggests this combination and Chenbro officially supports the VIA EPIA SN boards.

Additionally, Debian 5.0 Lenny seems to run fine on the SN series, only lm-sensors seems to have problems with SN18000G and SN10000EG (but not SN18000 and SN10000E).

So when the Chenbro ES34069 case showed up in digitec’s online shop, I ordered one there and a VIA EPIA SN18000G board at Brack. I didn’t order any disks since for data storage I plan to use the four Samsung 400 GB 3.5" S-ATA disks I bought for the N4100, and for the system I plant to use the 2.5" disk I initially bought for my MicroClient JrSX “c1”, but then continued to use it only with the CF card. Not yet sure, if I’ll also equip the slim-line optical drive slot, too.

The case took several weeks to deliver and the mainboard hasn’t arrived yet. Instead I got an e-mail from Brack that VIA products are currently very difficult to get in Switzerland. Reason is said to be that VIA tries to channel the distribution of their products to a single distributor. (Sounds somehow similar to what Apple tried with the iPhone and failed.)

Mini-ITX boards and power consumption

So I now have a nice case without a board. There aren’t that many Mini-ITX boards out there sporting 4 S-ATA ports. One which cleary stood out was the new Intel DG45FC Mini-ITX board with LGA775 socket. (In Switzerland neither available at Brack nor at digitec, but e.g. at PCP.) But reading the specs of this board it was also clear that it wasn’t thought for NAS systems but high-performance HTPCs — the focus seems to be on multimedia performance which a NAS doesn’t need.

Its newer sister, the Intel DQ45EK Mini-ITX board is focussed more on office and business PCs than on multimedia. But Intels remote adminstration is not really a plus for me (don’t need it, I’ve got SSH ;-) and it’s neither cheaper than the DG45FC nor does it have significantly lower power-consuption.

Despite the 120W power-supply there are people who already combined the Chenbro ES34069 with the Intel DG45FC or DQ45EK board, e.g. one of the administrators of the German NAS-Portal forums built such a machine and this German guy who wants to build a Windows Home Server based on such a combination. At least the NAS-Portal administrator found out that the board consumes so much power that together with the 4 S-ATA disks the included 120W power supply doesn’t suffice and the system is not stable in this configuration. Trusted Reviews review of the DG45FC explains why: It’s one of the first Mini-ITX board not following the MoDT idea, has a desktop chipset instead a mobile chipset and therefore hasn’t all of the power-saving features of those mobile chipsets.

But it’s easy to see anyway: Most of the CPUs supported by the DG45FC and DQ45EK boards have a TDP of 65W. Offically the processor cooler delivered with the case supports processors with up to 65W, but 65W is already more than the half of what the power supply delivers and according to the Trusted Reviews review, the board itself consumes another 35W itself. So for the four 3.5" S-ATA disks — which are usually not as economical as notebook disks — about 20W are left. This can’t work! The guy from NAS-Portal.org plans to solve the problem by using a universal 180W notebook power supply instead of the original one.

In comparison to the 100W of the both Intel boards, VIA’s SN18000G consumes only 26W (the fanless SN10000EG even only 22W) and that’s board and processor! That’s about ¼ of what the Intel board consumes. Imagine the difference between having a 100W light bulb (suffices for a whole small room) shining 365 days a year compared to a 25W light bulb (often used in bedside lamps) in a year.

Other Mini-ITX mainboards with 4x S-ATA include the following ones:

• Jetway JNC62K: According to Mini-ITX.com it fits into the Chenbro ES34069 case, but requires at least a 120W power supply which again questions its power consumption and its usage together with four 3.5" harddisks, although it is recommended for the ES34069 by Mini-ITX.com. But I haven’t made that good experiences with NVidia chipsets yet, so this board seems currently no option for me anyway. OTOH there’s German speaking guy who build a ES34069 based server using this board and only three SATA harddisks and runs the OpenSolaris based and commercial NexentaStor on it, so the hardware can’t be too exotic. (Review at Bit-Tech; Review at MiniITX.biz)
• (Added on 07-Oct-2008) Jetway NC81-LF: The non-Nvidia brother of the NC82K using the AMD 780G chipset. Supports CPUs from 35W to 65W TDP. (Review at MiniTechNet)
• Albatron KI690-AM2: Already over one year old and Silent PC Review says it has an extremely restrictive BIOS and poor fan control. (Another Review at TweakTown)
• iEi KINO-9454-R20: Seems to support only Pentium 4 and Pentium D.
• Several Commell mainboards: LV-66A (VIA C7 1.5 GHz), LV-672 (Pentium 4), LV-674 (Pentium D).
• Gigabyte GA-6KIEH-RH (not yet available)
• Kontron 986LCD-M/mITX: Socket mPGA478 and mPGA479, supports Intel Core 2 Duo Mobile beyond others; 3x GBit network interfaces, but also quite multimedia focussed — the review at EPIACenter.de (German written) says using it for NAS or a network-focussed machine is casting pearls before swine. :-) But the same counts for the DG45FC surely, too. ;-) Importer for Switzerland seems to be fabrimexSystems and end customers can buy it e.g. at ichbinleise.ch (which seem to sell only Kontron mainboards), but it’s way more expensive than the Intel DG45FC and even more expensive than the VIA SN18000G.
• J&W MINIX™ 780G-SP128MB (identical to the Albatron KI780G mainboard according to MiniTechNet): Another new multimedia focussed mainboard, but unless ATI drivers are way less usable than the NVidia drivers, I prefer not to use ATI graphics cards. (Review at MiniITX.biz)
• Advantech AIMB-221, AMD/ATI based and said to have a power-consumption less than 100W and a low TCO. But 100W are still too much for the 120W PSU. (German review at MiniTechNet)

Conclusion

For now, I decided to wait a little bit more for my VIA EPIA SN18000G board which still seems to be the best board for the Chenbro ES34069 case although not really cheap. But if I once in a not that distant future decide to have a desktop at home again, I’m quite sure it’ll sport a cute Mini-ITX case (perhaps a nice black-orange HFX micro M1 case by mCubed — unfortunately the M2 is no more available in a color combination including orange ;-) with an Intel DG45FC or Kontron 986LCD-M/mITX and a decent Core 2 Duo processor.

Software Plans

Of course my home server will run Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 Lenny on it, with software RAID-5 and LVM2 over the 1.6 TB of S-ATA disks resulting in 1.2 TB available disk space which will be offered using at least NFS, SMB and SSH (think sshfs). Planned software includes BackupPC (a very fine pulling backup system for machines which are not online 24/7) and Privoxy. I’ll perhaps also install Tor and a caching proxy like Squid or Polipo. Another idea is to run Mediatomb on that machine. :-)

Comments

Re: Mini-ITX based Home Server: Planning and Hardware

Posted by:	Patryk Ściborek
Website:	http://sciborek.com/
Time:	Thu, 02 Oct 2008 23:44

IMHO the most interesting thing in VIA CPU (when it's used in home file server) is VIA Padlock - hardware crypto accelerator. You can encrypt your disks and you should have much better performance than any low power Intel or AMD CPU.

Reply

why not Qnap TS-409

Posted by:	Reto
Website:
Time:	Fri, 03 Oct 2008 14:12

Hi Axel why did you not consider the TS-409? It should be supported by debian (www.cyrius.com/debian/orion/qnap) I'm planning on going down that route, so in case you know of a good reason not to do this, please respond (in an other comment) thanks alot!

Reply

Re: why not Qnap TS-409

Posted by:	Axel
Website:	http://noone.org/blog
Time:	Fri, 03 Oct 2008 15:46

The QNAP TS-409 is what I should have bought instead Thecus' N4100: It's the same class, but fully Debian supported. Would be my choice for a NAS today.

But I fear that 500 MHz (even the 1 GHz of the fanless VIA SN10000EG) are too slow for running BackupPC (which does a lot of hashing), especially if additional services like e.g. a filtering proxy and Tor.

Short said: I wanted something more powerful than what NAS boxes usually offer.

Reply

Re: Mini-ITX based Home Server: Planning and Hardware

Posted by:	Mark
Website:
Time:	Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:14

I'm planning a similar mini-itx based home server. Some other motherboards with 4 SATA taking mobile processors:

Intel Socket P: MSI MS-9818 (IM-GM45) AMD Socket S1: IEI KINO-690S1

You might also try the MSI MS-9832 (IM-945GC), which is an Intel Atom mini-itx board with 4 SATA

Reply

Re: Mini-ITX based Home Server: Planning and Hardware

Posted by:	Mark
Website:
Time:	Wed, 29 Oct 2008 20:38

I'm planning a similar mini-itx based home server. Some other motherboards with 4 SATA taking mobile processors:

Intel Socket P: MSI MS-9818 (IM-GM45) AMD Socket S1: IEI KINO-690S1

You might also try the MSI MS-9832 (IM-945GC), which is an Intel Atom mini-itx board with 4 SATA

Reply

Re: Mini-ITX based Home Server: Planning and Hardware

Posted by:	Axel
Website:	http://noone.org/blog
Time:	Wed, 29 Oct 2008 23:22

Thanks for the hint with the MSI MS-9832 (IM-945GC)! I was already looking for an Intel Atom Mini-ITX board with 4 SATA but didn't find one.

And Brack still has not delivered the board. ETA currently beginning of next week. And I ordered in Mid-August.

Reply

Re: Mini-ITX based Home Server: Planning and Hardware

Posted by:	curt
Website:
Time:	Mon, 08 Dec 2008 03:56

If you still don't have your mainboard you might want to take another look at the Gigabyte board. I have the following setup: ES34069 with Gigabyte GA-6KIEH-RH Intel T8300 (Penryn) cpu 2 GB DDR2 2 1TB Seagata SATA drives in software RAID1 (including the boot partition and OS logical volume) Centos 5.2 with Xen (and this is why the Gigabyte board -- you can't run hardware virtualization under the Via processors) Runs fast enough to saturate my small home gigabit network Runs fast enough to make a Windows Vista VM useable -- I keep the VM encrypted (using cryptsetup-luks) if not running Runs netatalk to support Apple's TimeMachine (you need to modify 2.0.3 to track changes in the db4 api)

Reply

ES34069 and DG45FC

Posted by:	Stefan Bethke
Website:	mailto:stb@lassitu.de
Time:	Sat, 13 Dec 2008 11:31

I've just put together a system with the Chenbro ES34069 witht he 180W power supply, the Intel DG45FC with an E7300 CPU and 4 GB RAM, and three Spinpoint F1s. Unfortunatly, the power supply does not appear to be stable under load. I'm running FreeBSD, and trying to update the ports tree (the meta information for how to compile packages), the system just shuts off hard. It then comes back on again by itself, but that doesn't really help much.

Unfortunatly, Chenbro does not publish any technical information on the DC/DC converter they're using, so one is left guessing what it can or cannot supply. I will check with the dealer (mini-itx.de) to see what suggestions they might have, and also try and seek out alternatives (i.e. picoPSU or similar, if they have high-power models).

Reply

Re: Mini-ITX based Home Server: Planning and Hardware

Posted by:	Superkikim
Website:	http://www.superkikim.com
Time:	Wed, 07 Jan 2009 00:18

Hi Axel. Did you take a decision now for your NAS ? I'm searching since weeks and I still hesitate. The Atom 330 Intel board is now out (D945GCLF2), you can find it at Steg. But I'd like WHS and I'd like it to be powerfull enough to encode CDs (and why not DVDs). So ... Atom 330 is maybe not the best choice.

There's a french company who make (as only product) a home server, linux based, with the chenbro box, and a Sempron LE 1150 processor. They say it is the better compromise for power/perf for this kind of box.

Finally, there is another alternative which I don't really like. It's the new Tranquil PC box (http://www.tranquilpc-shop.co.uk/acatalog/SQA-5H.html). Don't really like it because it looks like a closed black box. So no hardware replacement (if a new great motherboard/CPU combination comes out within three years.. who know).

Anyway, I would really be intersted in knowing if you sorted all this out.

Can contact me at talk.to(at)superkikim.com

Reply

Re: Mini-ITX based Home Server: Planning and Hardware

Posted by:	automate
Website:
Time:	Fri, 27 Feb 2009 22:26

hi have a look at this fujitsu mainboard with amd http://www.minipc.de/catalog/gl/46

Reply

Re: Mini-ITX based Home Server: Planning and Hardware

Posted by:	Rodrique Heron
Website:	mailto:swygue@gmail.com
Time:	Sun, 21 Feb 2010 18:25

Did you ever decided on a board?

I trying to decide if I should purchase the CHENBRO ES34069 180W. I want to use this more as a general purpose desktop I'm dubbing Nas-Desktop. I want to run VM's so I would like to have Intel or AMD VT but that's optional, I can always use Vbox. I would like to have more that 2GB memory, I just think that's too limited.

I'm looking at the ZOTAC G43ITX-A-E LGA 775 because I can get up 8Gig memory.

Thanks

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