[rescue] Digest Why not to use an Atom as a Server

[Nathan Raymond]

On Thu, Jan 19, 2012 at 12:40 PM, William Enestvedt <
William.Enestvedt at jwu.edu> wrote:

>   So for home NAS building, where I would prefer to run it all the time
> as long as it doesn't burn *too* much electricity, is a little
> Atom-based box the right choice? Is anyone selling these, or should I
> just pick up a Western Digital My Book with an Ethernet port? (Honest
> question: I fdon't have time or budget to reinvent the wheel, even if
> it's cool.)
>

My home firewall is pfSense running on a custom-build Atom (Supermicro
server motherboard) ITX system.  Wifi access point is DD-WRT running on a
Netgear WNR3500L.  I've been very happy with this combination, very solid
24/7.

In 2007 I spent a few months investigating buying a NAS vs. building my
own, and concluded that I was better off buying a Synology NAS product, so
I got their dual drive bay DS207+ (PowerPC processor in it) and it is still
running great, I've had three sets of drives in it over the years as I
expanded the capacity, and software updates from Synology added a lot of
useful features as well.  These days they sometimes use ARM and x86
embedded CPUs instead of PowerPC depending on the product as I recall.
Management features include telnet and SSH support as well as a package
system and a well developed browser-based GUI.  From what I've seen their
products have continued to get great reviews, I recommend looking into them:

http://www.synology.com/

- Nate