Hi chaps.
I currently have a "server" in the attick which is composed of my old trusty Abit NF-S mobo with an old Athlon XP cpu on it. It's working fine as a NAS box - stores all my media / files and I have a few services running on it such as Twokymedia for DLNA support, FTP server, torrent client, etc.
I have a couple of hard drives fitted to it, but would be looking at expanding and securing them (not in a RAID setup at the moment).
My main reason driving a change is to reduce power consumption. It's on 24/7 and as such is fairly power hungry. I've underclocked the CPU as it's not doing much and have fitted a gigabit network card to give it decent LAN performance.
I've looked at the various NAS solutions, but they all seem a bit too limited in the functionality they offer. From experience and looking around, you just can't beat a Windows / Linux setup where you can have all the software / services you need running.
There are new NAS boxes out there such as the QNAP TS-409 but it's pricey at £380 or so excluding hard drives and although it provides a fair few features, I'm sure I'd find one service I'll need which it doesn't support.
So cutting a long story short (sorry for the long driveling explanation ), I'm looking at getting something like a Mini ITX solution.
Looking at the ITX store, there are loads of motherboards on offer and I don't really know where to start. The only prerequisites I can think of is I need either 3 or 4 SATA ports or a PCI / PCI-e expansion slot to put in a SATA controller RAID card. Other prerequisite is gigabit ethernet. I only need one LAN connector as it's already behind my firewall and doesn't serve as a NAT / internet routing box. But there are just sooooo many to chose from. I could pick one that appears to tick the boxes however surely someone here must have done this and may be able to provide really useful advice.
Mods: please note I didn't post this in the SFF section as I wanted to catch a larger audience - maybe there are alternatives to SFF / Mini ITX / Pico ITX solutions out there...
So, what do you guys think?
TIA