By now, Cervantes (my webserver) is starting to get pretty old. While it still performs it’s basic functions decently, I’m wanting to move to a RAID setup to prevent data loss due to a hard drive crash. While I do have nightly backups of the most important data on Cervantes (my posts) the rest of the data could still be lost at any moment.
I’ve found a couple of nice Mini-ITX cases for server use, both made by a company named Chenbro. One has two hot-swappable drive bays and a 150W power supply, and the other has four bays with a 180W PSU. Besides the number of bays, the cases are otherwise very similar. What type of RAID I decide will influence the case selection.
When I first started putting this build together, my plan was to use the Intel Atom board with the 330 dual core processor. Unfortunately, that board does not support hardware RAID, so I’d have to do RAID in software. While the Atom should be able to handle that ok, it does mean that I’d need a separate boot disk. The Atom board only has two SATA ports, so that boot disk would have to be on either IDE or USB, and I have found online some small flash-memory modules that can plug directly into those connectors on the motherboard.
When I ran into the hardware RAID issue on the Atom board, I also began to look at other Mini-ITX boards that DID support hardware RAID. If I want to stick to an Atom CPU, I can get an ION board, which pairs the Atom CPU with an Nvidia chipset. While I’d gain hardware RAID, the ION boards are considerably more expensive than the Intel boards, and most of the multimedia features of the board would go to waste.
The second alternative was to use a Mini-ITX Socket LGA 775 board, which are available with either a Q45 or G45 chipset. The board feature four SATA ports as well as hardware RAID support on the motherboard. I’d also be able to use a much more powerful CPU, though it brings up the question of whether the smaller power supplies in these cases would support them (In fact, a quick calculation confirms that the system would pull around 160W, just over the power provided by the smaller case, and a little close for confort on the larger). I’d like to have a Core 2 Quad processor, as I do sometimes SSH into my server for development purposes. The power issue could be remedied by replacing the included PSU with a larger one. The two bay case uses a FLEX ATX power supply, and a quick Google turns up a 270W for sale, which would provide plenty of power.
Overall, I’m leaning towards the higher end build, due to both the hardware RAID and the better CPU for development, as well as the possibility of running virtual machines on top of it.