This was a big reason why I used a nice, roomy cookie tin, rather than some pre-built case that crams everything into a tight space with no potential for fanless airflow.

Cheers

Probably at least double the power, I expect.

Even my notebook uses 2X the wattage of my server, as measured at the AC outlet.

Cheers

Unfortunately the sites selling them never seem to mention that. By the way I have never had any problems with CPU temperatures on fanless, just hard drives.

Heh.. for domestic service, first class is a synonym for air mail. The latter term really only has special meaning when shipping to other countries, particularly across oceans.

The difference between surface mail and air mail can be rather significant in that context, both in time and in cost.

Cheers

Assuming it is available. USPS dropped internatilnal surface mail on May 14, 2007.

If you would do that, I'd take you up on that offer. Even at this price, it's slightly less than what I found just the picoPSU for in Norway...

Sending you a PM.

Thanks, Mark!

Stig

I ended up with a Vostro 200 Slim machine, 1.6GHz C2D, 2GB RAM, 250GB Disk, DVDRW new in box for £150 inc. £200+ cheaper than a Mini-ITX SN 1GHz, Chenbro Case, DVDRW and RAM (before hard drives).

As the hardware goes, the case is good quality, and everything is quite smartly laid out inside. There is space for two hard drives which are quick release, one empty (external) 3.25" bay and the 5.25" bay with the DVDRW in it. 2x PCI, 1x PCIeX1 and 1x PCIeX16 all Low Profile only. There are 4x SATA ports inside, no IDE. Ports on the back are all USB so no Serial, no PS/2 and no Firewire. Its half way to being 'Legacy Free' - Dell still find the need to put a floppy connector on the board and no DVI on the back.

The box itself is relatively quiet. Has to be said its not as quiet as my old full tower monster which has 120mm fans and a Thermalright heatsink, but its not bad. Always difficult to describe, but its not amazingly quiet. If you stand the box up, there is a fan at the top near the back and one on the left side (CPU). There is no active cooling in the front for hard drives, but there is space and big vents there so its not too bad. Adding another disk in the 3.5" bay for RAID 5 might be pushing it, but I'll monitor temperatures for a little while and know for sure. The PSU is labelled 250W and only has 3x SATA connectors on short cables in total, so this may need some light hacking for another drive too.

I put in a couple of big Western Digital 'Green Power' hard drives - these are really nice drives, the quietest ones I've ever come across (I'd say they were totally silent) and barely warm after running for a few hours. Pretty outstanding, I'd really recommend them unless you want very high performance.

I wanted to install the OS on a 4GB Compactflash using a SATA-CF adapter which I bought. There is only a 50% chance that this device is detected on boot which makes it pretty useless. When it is detected by the computer it seems to work well. I gave up on this.

Linux isn't totally straightforward. Knoppix will not boot from the SATA DVD drive. Ubuntu Server 8.04 will install without much problem and then hang on boot. Reading around it seems to be a problem with the Vostro and 2.6.24. Reinstalling a minimal install of an earlier version and dist-upgrading (holding back the kernel) is probably the path of least resistance.

Fun and games.

That would explain the difficulty I was having, I assumed my CD was burnt badly.

What bit does it hang on?

The initial kernel load I think.

Which part though?

I've got a HP SFF desktop here and it always hangs during bootup because its PCI implementation is buggered. You need to give it extra options to use an alternate probing mechanism.

I think it dies long before that, in the bootstrap stage. But to be honest I didn't look too careful because I assumed my disk was at fault. I haven't had chance to go back and sort it out because the machine in question is my machine for testing Vista stuff on.

There's been a *lot* of concern about those drives, in that they spin-down automatically *much* too frequently, leading many people to expect premature deaths.

Keep an eye on the head load/unload counts from smartctl -a to see what's happening with your own system. Apparently a proprietary "vendor unique" command/parms is required to disable this stupid default behaviour, and WD provide a DOS(!?) utility to issue the command.

Cheers

One would hope that if they designed the drives to spin up and down a lot, they'd engineer 'em to take the stress...

Y'know, if it were Seagate, I'd laugh at that statement, but for WD, I'd almost trust 'em to do the right thing. Almost.

s/Seagate/Maxtor/

Yeah, them too.

Thanks for the heads up, I will install smartmontools and get it reporting every so often. The home server is only really alive when I'm at home so only really a couple of hours a day at the most, so maybe this behavior is ok for me? They are in RAID and have a 3yr warranty, so I'm not going to return them in a panic... but we'll see how it goes. If/when either of them fail I'll post back here!

I wish my damn SATA-CF adapter worked properly so I could install the OS on there.

Ubuntu 7.10 Gutsy or 8.04 Hardy of any flavour will not boot on the Vostro if the Video Memory setting in the BIOS under Advanced Configuration is set to 1MB. Set it to 8MB and it all works.

Just had to put that out there - this bug wasted many of my hours.

Thought I'd continue this since the new kid on the block is the VIA ARTiGO A2000 'barebones' fileserver. Pico-ITX, 1.5GHz, 1xCF, 2xSATA, Gigabit, External PSU. I like it, tempted to eBay what I have and get one of these instead. Its so shiny!

Sexy.