Small server board

One of the drives on my NAS died and it's out of warranty, so I'm using this as an excuse to do a full upgrade and may turn it from a NAS to a all-around server. It doesn't need to be beefy, as it's not going to be used more than my family. I just want to go for reliability at this point.

With the current sale going on at Newegg there's a 15% off sale on all server boards, so I figured now is good time to start piecing it together. I will be picking up a hardware RAID card so that'll offload probably the hardest thing the system will be doing, so onboard SATA doesn't matter, but I'll be using an SSD boot drive so SATA 6 is a plus.

So far this board is at the top of my list. USB3, SATA6, Atom is OK since it won't be doing anything extremely strenuous (I'm talking media streaming, FTP server, and expanded to a few other low impact tasks down the line). 4GB ram limit is a little discouraging but I'll see what I could do.

Any suggestions? It's a 15% discount and I'm not looking to go above $200 or so for CPU/motherboard, which I was mainly looking at Atom boards. It doesn't have to be mITX and ECC is an option, but I heard the ECC 204pin laptop DIMMS are hard to come by.

Look at the AM1 platform, a lot of Gigabyte AMD boards support ECC also.

I thought about it, but there don't seem to be any currently legible for the discount (they have to be in the "server section".) Can't hurt to look around though, since they'll probably be the same price as an Atom based "server" motherboard with the discount.

Edit: $40 for the boards? I can swing that

Edit 2: Thanks, going with the AM1 setup. Got a GA-AM1M-S2H, Athlon 5350 (Newegg has the combo deal) and 8GB Corsair Sport. Didn't need ECC, I just would've been OK if I had to have it.

Please post back here or with a build thread as I've been pretty interested in the am1 setup to replace my current media server.

Angry said:

Please post back here or with a build thread as I've been pretty interested in the am1 setup to replace my current media server.

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Sure. I also ordered a small 840 Evo to use as a boot drive, this way I can start configuring the OS to how I like it before throwing heavy stuff at it. I'll let you know how it handles.

subd

What do you plan on using for an os?

mimart7 said:

What do you plan on using for an os?

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I was debating between Ubuntu Server and Debian. I'm using FreeNAS in my current NAS, but I was hoping to use something a bit more expandable.

I already know of the problems between APUs and linux, but I only plan to use the actual GPU part of it for the initial setup and install, most of the other stuff I'm OK trying to shoehorn in over SSH.

As I'm waiting for parts to come in, I started a build log thread here for anyone curious.