Mini-ITX based Home Server: Planning and Hardware //at 18:24 //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. :-)

Mini-ITX based Home Server: Hardware Review //at 18:23 //by abe

Mostly for my backups needs, I planned a Mini-ITX based home server around the Chenbro ES34069 Mini-ITX case which features four hot-swap S-ATA bays. I wanted a low-consumption motherboard and CPU in there (not only because of the default 120W power supply) and since low-consumption mainboards with 4 S-ATA connectors are quite seldom I’ve chosen the not so cheap VIA EPIA SN18000G mainboard with actively cooled 1.8 GHz VIA C7 processor and a maximum power consumption of less than 30W (including CPU).

Waiting for delivery

While the Chenbro ES34069 case I ordered at digitec “only” needed a few weeks to deliver, the VIA EPIA SN18000G mainboard from Brack took over eleven weeks to deliver, it finally has been delivered on Wednesday, 5th of November 2008.

I initially ordered the VIA board for CHF 324, now it’s at CHF 397 (without rebate even at CHF 439) because Brack seems to have had a lot of hassles to get some of them at all. Although they usually sell for the prices at the time they ship the hardware (market price), they sold it to me at their purchase price, so it became only about CHF 15 more expensive than when I ordered. And since the RAM price dropped by one third during those eleven weeks, the whole order became about CHF 25 cheaper, the order was CHF 10 cheaper overall than when ordered. :-) (Still waiting for the according voucher, though.)

So I’ve joined the two main components together, installed Debian Lenny on it, crammed four 400 GB Samsung S-ATA disks (formerly in a TheCus N4100) and the 160 GB 2.5” harddisk from my MicroClient JrSX (I never really used it in there, it always runs from CF card) into it, created a software RAID-5 and now fill it with music, games and backups.

But not everything was as easy as it sounds above. Although Chenbro lists the VIA EPIA SN18000G as officially compatible mainboard for the ES34069, not everything really fitted as expected. So here’s my review of this hardware combination.

Chenbro ES34069

It’s really awesome how much features you can stuff in such a small case. Of course it’s not as small as a thin client case or the mCubed HFX micro case, but it’s smaller than most book-size cases like the ASUS Pundits, just a little bit thicker.

Inside the case (laying on its left side) there are two decks. The lower deck contains the 3.5” hot-swappable S-ATA harddisk bays, the internal part of the power supply and the two fans for cooling the interal power supply components and the disks. The upper deck has space for the mainboard, a 2.5” harddisk, a slim-line optical drive slot and all the front-panel stuff (card reader, LEDs, USB sockets).

Both decks are divided in two section. The front section belongs to the case itself and the back section containing the mainboard mount points and the two fans can be easily unplugged after removing four screws and keeping an eye on the cables from the lower to the upper deck. That way the mainboard can be mounted very easily. So far a very convincing design.

To mount the 2.5 harddisk in between the mainboard and the front panel, it’s not really necessary, but convenient to remove the slim-line optical drive slot, since you then have better access to the harddisk’s IDE socket. To remove the slot, you need to remove the front cover. That sounded easier than it actually was and I nearly broke of one its catches. :-/

Although all parts of the case seems to fitting very well together, the bays for the hot-swappable drives weren’t perfect: The drive slots not always connected even if the latch iss already closed. This was definitely better with the TheCus N4100. Additionally the bays seem to be made for slightly larger disks, so mine had play and the screws pressed the it together and you need to take care that the screws don’t cant.

A big positive point of the case was that there were all necessary screws included and they were fitting. This was a bigger problem with the TheCus N4100, since many harddisks ship with their own screws, but those are seldom the needed flat-head ones.

Even a P-ATA to slim-line optical drive adapter was included, so I don’t need to buy one. (Would have costed CHF 42 at digitec.)

VIA EPIA SN18000G

While it’s surely not the most performant board out there, I’m quite satisfied with its performance. I installed BackupPC 3.1.0 as backup system on it and it works like a charm. It daily backs up up to 14 machines over ssh tunnels – more to come) and is way more performant than expected. But I probably had very low expectations due to everyone arguing about the bad performance of the VIA C7. ;-)

Not nice, but known is the problem that most (but not all) USB connectors on the SN mainboard have 2.00mm pitch while all the case’s plugs have 2.54mm pitch. Apropriate adaptors are available from Mini-ITX.com. Thanks to Akim for this tip!

Power consumption

I hoped to get more details into this posting, e.g. measured power consumption, etc. But then I recently read in the c’t magazine how inexact my watt meter (from Brennenstuhl) is, so its values would probably bring more confusion than help. Additionally I don’t feel like powering down the server just for measurement.

Feedback

I got quite a few mails with hints to further Mini-ITX boards and TDP but also with questions about the case. I hope that this blog post asnwers some of the questions also for other readers. Thanks to all who replied to my initial blog post about my Chenbro/VIA based home server, either by mail, or comment, or both. :-)

Further plans

For deploying music to my other computers I tried both, mediatomb and gmediaserver but none really convinced me. Currently I just mount the media directory using the FUSE and ssh based sshfs. Not sure if I’ll add NFS due to it’s user base syncing hell.

Further plans are an HTTP proxy with ad filtering and caching capabilities, it’ll be Privoxy combined with either Squid or Polipo. Maybe even a Tor SOCKS proxy.