VIA Epia Homeserver Project - Ingredients

I recently decided to put together a small linux box to be a media- and fileserver and router and to be a good playground as well :) My goal is to have a box which is small, quiet and has a low power consumption and not to be forgotten, cheap. From now on, I will write about how to put it together from the bare scratch.

Let's see the ingredients for this project:

Motherboard:

I chose VIA Epia series because of its good availability and because of having a very good power consumption figure. Note that if you plan to play HD movies directly then this is most likely not your platform (better pick something based on Intel's Atom), yet for a router / file server box it is a good trade-off. For a router we need two physical ethernet interface and for high capacity storage SATA connectors. This is what one has to bear in mind when picking the actual device.

I chose EN12000EG because..., well it was a good deal on ebay :) Yet, it has two onboard SATA connectors, and one can add an additional ethernet interface via its PCI slot which is what I exactly did by putting a RTL8169-based gigabit ethernet card in. The motherboard is based on a VIA Eden processor meaning that it is completely fanless which is an important point as well.

Regarding to the memory: One 256MB 533MHz DDR2 one would do it, as we will not need anything that consumes a great deal of system memory. It has to be noted however that the onboard VGA takes 64MB out of the value above.

It is a good thing that the motherboard is well documented, all documentation is available at VIA.

System hard disk:

For this purpose, I will use a 4GB CF card, which is enough for the bare system. To hook this up to the main board, a CF to IDE converter is necessary, which is in the 1 USD range on ebay. Note that it is a good idea to buy a dual CF converter (so that one will be the master and one will be the slave device) for optional temporary storage for for instance torrent, as the main hard disk can be still turned off and does not consume any power. 

Main hard disk:

This will be a Samsung EcoGreen drive as we do not need really fast random seek, rather a low power and reasonable sized storage. Anyhow, the box should be designed so that it turns off the hard drive whenever possible.

Case:

For some reason, cases designed for mini-ITX motherboards are rather expensive. Because of this, I choose a mini-ATX /ITX case, Codegen's MX-31-A2. The only drawback is that the built-in power supply is designed to be capable of 300W output so that it is expected to have very low efficiency for low power systems. This is to be measured later so that I can decide whether it is necessary to replace it.