Dear Lazyweb/Geeky Question

[chezmax]

Just out of curiosity,

I'm looking for a low cost, small, quiet box, likely to install linux on to be a network server.
Mostly, it's to share a large external hard drive, and possibly to host a DLNA media server (for the PS3).

So, basically the requirements are:
Cheap
Small
Quiet
USB 2 ports
Can run Linux (with samba, and a DLNA/uPnP server... or otherwise can do this without linux. It would be nice to have a linux server around though.)

In an idea world something like the Mac Mini would work great for this, but it's not *cheap*. A 40 GB PS3 would also work, but it's not particularly *small* (and maybe still not *cheap*).

Any great and wonderful solutions would be appreciated.

I'm currently using an old laptop for this (meeting everything but USB2 ports, the external hard drive is slow! tee hee!)

Comments

[zanate.livejournal.com]

Man, I'd be interested in the same thing. I'd add "low power consumption" too, for kicks.

A few neurons banded together and gave me enough info to google this out of the mists of time. It mentions Gumstix. Maybe not quite what you're looking for.

You might want to google KuroBox too.

Beyond that, I don't really know.

[chezmax]

Low power consumption would be nice (which is why I have it on an old laptop for now, which won't draw more than a couple dozen watts.)

Those gumstix things are reasonably cool.

[taffer.livejournal.com]

Look around here; depending on what parts you can recycle, you could get a small box for a couple hundred bucks.

[electroly.livejournal.com]

If you had internal drives instead of external, the D-Link DNS-323 NAS would work. It has built-in Samba/uPnP/FTP/iTunes servers and has two drive bays (RAID 0 or 1). It costs about $180 USD.

[chezmax]

That's not too bad. The PS3 is kind of picky about media servers though. I could always crack the drive out of the external case. Neat though.

[electroly.livejournal.com]

I've only used the Samba and FTP servers, so I'm not sure if the uPnP stuff is any good. It might be really flaky; I don't know. It's all Linux though, so I assume they're just using whatever open source uPnP server is popular. I think you can get a root shell on there somehow but I've never tried.

[quatch.livejournal.com]

I ran into this randomly yesterday: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856101059

[marnoch.livejournal.com]

I always look at Canadacomputers when I think of this.

you can build an AMD box for about $300-$400 that draw's about 50W on max load.

CPU - $80 ($40 if you really wanted something cheap)
MOBO - $80
RAM 2G - $60
HDD 500GB - $100
Case - $30-$80

but it isnt in the 'small' category. you could always build your own case to the exact size.

As always you get 2 of three things: easy, cheap, small

[dysan27.livejournal.com]

Not precicely cheap, though I haven't looked at all of them, but if you want small and quiet there is always mini-itx, no fan is no noise

[chezmax]

You know, that's some pretty sexy stuff.

[chezmax]

That particular website is in the UK and is rather expensive, but I found some cheap mini-itx stuff on ncix. Thanks for the pointer. :) (See my soon to be made post for what I got)

[dysan27.livejournal.com]

Check on the rim classifieds there was a compact form factor computer for sale for $190 posted on the 8th. no sure where though.