Putting a quiet and roomy home server

Objective: to assemble a small-sized home server with four 3.5-inch HDDs, as quiet as possible. It will serve as a NAS, backup server and torrent download.

Solution :
First, it was necessary to choose a motherboard. The standard options are mATX and Mini-ITX, both of which I tried earlier.

The mATX form factor was rejected right away, with little effort it would be impossible to make compact with it. Existing cases for mATX boards are not designed for 4 disks, they usually put bad and noisy power supplies. Making a compact and quiet power supply for such a system is difficult and expensive, since the power consumption will be more than 150 watts.

The Mini-ITX form factor gives you great freedom of choice, here are the slow-moving Atom, Celeron processors, the peppy mid-range Athlon and the powerful Core 2 Duo / Quad. The price varies greatly, but Atom is enough for my tasks. Such boards consume little power, take up little space and usually are not much inferior to mATX boards in terms of number of functions. There are also disadvantages here: high prices, a slightly smaller number of connectors, a small selection.

Unfortunately, in the Russian market the choice of Mini-ITX boards is less than abroad, but this should not be surprising, given their low popularity. A good assortment is presented on Yandex Market and in some companies specializing in small form factors. Here it is worth noting Antex and Onyx (aka dont.ru) On foreign sites ( linitx.com , mini-itx.com , idotpc.com ) the choice is much wider.

I did not find a suitable low-power board with 4 SATA connectors, but I did not want to buy a separate and two sata controller, the only PCI slot could still be useful for something more useful, for example a Wi-Fi adapter.

I also wanted to make a home router out of a computer, so I was looking for a board with two ethernet connectors.

The choice was, although not big, but google, I found a great motherboard with a dual-core Atom processor, PCI-slot, two ethernet-connectors and, lo and behold, four SATA-connectors. A great option: a low-power, but not quite weak processor, a complete set of necessary connectors and just one fan.

Now I had to choose a case. For 4 hard drives, there was one single enclosure, Chenbro ES34069 , which looks as good as the motherboard found, but quite expensive. After reading the forums, it turned out that he was no different in silence.

Well, let's go further, you can buy another case and make a place for 4 disks in it. How to place the discs at that time I only imagined, but it didn’t scare me. After a thorough search, two small, suitable -sized cases were found: AOpen S180 and CFI GROUP CBI-A8989TG. Both resembled the hulls of the first bareborn systems. According to the calculations, both were suitable, but I decided to take the case from Aopen, which was slightly higher, so that there was a place in reserve. Subsequently, this decision turned out to be the only right one, since everything would not have packed so well in the second building. But first things first.

The power supply in the purchased case turned out to be extremely noisy and I decided to look for an alternative. Power supplies for Mini-ITX systems usually consist of two components - an AC adapter, like laptops and a converter board. The board converts the voltage supplied by the unit, usually 12 volts, to the required 3.3, 5, 12, -12 volts. According to calculations, the system was supposed to consume up to 100 watts at its peak. The range of such fanless power supplies was very small. In Moscow, it turned out to be impossible to find a board and an adapter with an output power of more than 80 watts. Adapters 220 - 12 Volts with a capacity of 100 watts or more in Moscow are piece goods, trips to markets and searches on the network almost did not work. Only one company offered to bring a 120-watt power supply, but in an incomprehensible time frame. There was also a single 120-watt board, also to order and at an incomprehensible time. I had to search on foreign Internet. German and American stores offered such kits, there was even a good choice, but at a price of about $ 200 with delivery. Then I turned my attention to automotive converters, essentially the same motherboards only designed for floating automotive 12-24 Volts, and not stable 12. For such motherboards, it’s much easier to find a power supply, because any laptop with a power of 100-120 Watts will fit. I had a power supply, and I found a similar price option on eBay. Well, all that remained was to wait for him in the mail. only designed for floating automotive 12-24 Volts, and not stable 12. For such boards, it is much easier to find a power supply, because any one from a laptop with a power of 100-120 Watts will fit. I had a power supply, and I found a similar price option on eBay. Well, all that remained was to wait for him in the mail. only designed for floating automotive 12-24 Volts, and not stable 12. For such boards, it is much easier to find a power supply, because any one from a laptop with a power of 100-120 Watts will fit. I had a power supply, and I found a similar price option on eBay. Well, all that remained was to wait for him in the mail.

The hard drives were selected in the Barracuda LP series, they are cheaper and less heated than adults 7002.11 and the like. However, during the tests it turned out that under loads they still get very hot and forced cooling would not hinder them. Between the disks had to make gaps for the free passage of air.

In the purchased case there was an iron carriage for attaching one 5-inch and two 3.5-inch devices. It was not possible to fix 4 disks on it well. But the metal carriage, designed to install four discs in three 5-inch compartments, which was presented to me by a friend, did an excellent job of this task. There was a place for mounting a fan on it; when installing the disks, there were enough gaps between them for blowing.

In Leroy Merlin, iron corners and screws suitable for securing the carriage in the casing were found. The adapter board was mounted on specially soldered metal racks. The power supply that came with the case was removed on the back of the case, in the place where the fan of the power supply and the 220 V connector howled, an impressive empty space formed, which had to be closed somehow. With scissors for metal, I carefully cut out the patch from an aluminum sheet and attached it to the case. Now it was time to make a cunning MOLEX — 4 SATA power cable, since the power supply had only one molex connector. 20-pin power cable connecting the mat. I soldered the board and the power converter from the cable from the old power supply.



The motherboard supported PWM-control of the fan speed, and to purge the hard drives it was necessary to buy a quiet fan, I had to go shopping and buy one PWM-fan and one quiet one with a special resistor, which further slows down its slow rotation. I removed the regular fan on the radiator of the motherboard, deciding that there was enough fan on the case. It turned out that one cooler was blowing on disks, the second one drove this air out of the case, simultaneously cooling the processor and chipset. During the tests, the processor overheated and I came up with a kind of duct from a sheet of plastic. The drawing was completed for several days, mock-up of paper, and as a result, using scissors and glue, it was turned into a plastic casing for a radiator on a mat. circuit board.

The easiest task was to buy memory. :) For the system partition, I bought an 8 GB flash drive and soldered an adapter to it for connecting to the internal connector on the mat. circuit board. The OS was put on a USB flash drive, the computer was assembled. As a result, I assembled a quiet computer, where everything turned out quite compactly, there was really little free space inside.

Now it runs on Ubuntu 9.10, backups are done using snapback2 + rsync.

Final estimate

Detail	Cost
Body	1900 p.
Mat. pay	6200 p.
RAM 2 GB	600 p.
Power supply (board)	1000 p.
Power supply unit (adapter)	presented, on sale from 1200 r.
4 discs Barracuda LP 1.5 TB	14400 p.
4-wheel carriage	presented, on sale from 700 r.
Fans (2 pcs.)	600 p.
Flash drive	600 p.
SATA cables	140 p.
Fasteners, plastic, glue, etc.	100 p.
Total:	~ 25500 p.
with an adapter and a carriage would come out	~ 27500 p.

Small test

I present the results of unixbench and, for comparison, the test results of a desktop computer (Athlon X2, 2 cores, 2.5 GHz, 2 GB RAM) and a server based on Xeon 5500 (8 cores, 2.5 GHz, 48 GB RAM).

Summary

The cheapest NAS on 4 disks I found on Yandex Market for 14,000 rubles (without disks). My computer came out a thousand rubles cheaper and certainly more powerful and functional. Of the minuses - a lot of time was spent, finding parts in my case was not easy, and we add here the risks of buying goods from abroad by mail.

Thanks for attention!