looked around and see a lot of commotion about whs and low power options, but no concrete solutions. plus everyone has their own angle on what they're trying to do.

what i'd like:

1. reasonable power use. as low as possible without worrying about 'extremely' low power consumption.
2. four to six sata ports
3. gigabit of course
4. not worried about transcoding.. just want enough power to run 40-50 torrents at one time (most sit unactive.. seeding, but no current activity) and stream music/video files at the same time.

also, i haven't searched this yet, but any recommendations on large 1.5 or 2.0 tb low power drives would be appreciated.

i would like a whs to run 24/7 to store all my music/movies and also log into it remotely to run my torrents. i just think it's a waste for my crysis machine to run 24/7 just for torrents.. i also have other laptops that i want the whs to be a "big drive" for.

i already have a legit copy of whs, so i'm not interested in linux or nas. i'm looking forward to trying windows automatic backups since i'm too lazy to backup myself.

thanks.. ! i built my gaming rig with all the great advice from this website and i'm so happy with how quiet it is! my box before that was an airplane!!

Hi and welcome to SPCR.

There are countless builds in the gallery thread - start looking there to get an idea for hardware requirements. Basically any modern motherboard chipset today will support 6 sata ports and have decent (enough) on-board gigE lan.

I recommend you THOROUGHLY investigate www.wegotserved.com - it's a site devoted to WHS.

Finally, your question might be better asked in the System Advise sub-forum.

Many people are reporting good builds using the Biostar A760G M2+ motherboard any a low power Athlon (4850e or the newer Athlon II X2 250). You can often find these bundled together for ~$100-$110. This is the board I built my WHS machine with and I have had no problems whatsoever.

It seems to meet all your requirements. Its uATX, 6 SATA, GigE, and can be configured for low power (see here: http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=54409&highlight=30w+barrier). It supports ECC RAM if you want it, or regular desktop RAM if you don't.

I fully concur about wegotserved. GREAT website.

Good luck.

I'm using a Acer Easystore H340 which is a NAS built around an atom n230 running WHS with utorrent for my torrenting requirements.

It's not silent, but nothing with hard mounted drives is going to be. The fan(s) are pretty quiet and where it is mutes the sound pretty well so that my desktop (which is closer to my ear) covers any noise my NAS makes.

Intel:
Celeron 430 35w
Zotac NF610I-K-E

I've got an older version of that board and it works great for what it is. The only problem I have with it is that it only has two SATA ports, that newer has a total of four. If I had found that board two weeks ago I would have used it for my WHS box.

AMD:
Athlon II X2 235e 45w
Athlon 2650e 15w
Athlon 2650e 15w
Athlon 64 X2 3250e 22w
Athlon X2 3250e 22w
Zotac GF8200-C-E


I've got the 8200 with a BE X2 45w CPU in my HTPC and just love it! Four SATA slots with a super low power chip would make for a nice WHS.

Celeron 3200 is a much better processor for an Intel based system and for $10 more. The 430 does not support speed stepping and in my actual experience it runs much hotter than the three different Wolfdale processor I own.

+1. My idle power consumption actually dropped when I replaced the Celeron 430 with a Pentium E5200 and added a Sapphire Radeon HD4550.

I noticed a 7-10c drop in temps in a Shuttle K45 simply switching to the e5200 from the Celery 430. Not sure on wattage...

Ah. Good to know, thanks.