[geeks] Interesting small NAS chassis from Intel

[Lionel Peterson]

>From: Sridhar Ayengar <ploopster at gmail.com>
>Date: 2007/12/03 Mon PM 01:01:28 CST
>To: The Geeks List <geeks at sunhelp.org>
>Subject: Re: [geeks] Interesting small NAS chassis from Intel

>Lionel Peterson wrote:
>> Hello all,
>> 
>> Came across this, thought some might be interested: Intel ss4200-EHW
>> [0] server chassis with 4 SATA II bays, Celeron 420 CPU, 512 Meg RAM,
>> Gigabit Ethernet, and 4x USB 2.0 ports. Price appears to be around
>> $425, but I can't find it in-stock anywhere (several places have it
>> for special order).
>> 
>> It isn't the cheapest solution, but to be honest, it isn't that bad
>> (if you just want something that will work) - not sure if Solaris
>> will run on it (it should), but Intel is pushing it for things like
>> Windows Home Server[1] and more mainstream server applications.
>
>Bleh.  If it had four full-size drive bays, I might have been 
>interested, since I'd be able to use a 5-in-3 and an optical drive.

Why put an optical drive in an embedded server - OS install? PXE or USB DVD drives are fine for occasional system restores IMHO...

5 in 3 adapter assumes the system has 5 SATA ports on-board, if not, there's no "conventional" slot to add a SATA controller. 4 Drives allows you to create a RAID 10 2 Terabyte share with 4x 1 TB SATA drives, and you can install a "disk on a chip" on the MB to have the OS installed on firmware, not one of the drive bays.

Look, this is a case for software like WHS, it is not intended as a general-purpose mini-tower server. For that, I like SuperMicro chassis like this:

SuperWorkstation 5035B-TB [0]
4 hot-swap SATA bays, 2 more SATA ports for OS, optical drive, Core2Duo, FSB1333, 4x DIMM sockets (8 Gig supported), 465 Watt PS (single) - about $600

Of course, that requires RAM, CPU & some graphics card - for about $1,000 + HDs you'd have a real nice small server ($150 worth of RAM, $150-200 of CPU, $30 DVD-R/W and a low-end $30 PCI-E video card, for example)

Lionel

[0] http://supermicro.com/products/system/tower/5035/SYS-5035B-TB.cfm