Hot air going upwards, I expect convection to work much better when the motherboard is horizontal. What is the rationale behind the temperature being actually higher when the board is horizontal? I imagine that's because convection gets air flowing along the heatsink in the vertical position. The a...

Good SSDs are not so cheap here and I was thinking about bottom of the barrel stuff like the 8G Kingston actually.

I have zero experience with digital TV. I guess it makes sense for the signal to be compressed to being with.

1) Watch & record 2 digital signals (1+1). If you're planning to rely on the CPU to compress a high-definition stream in real time, you might need a powerful one. It depends on the details which you didn't provide. 2) Browse the web. 3) View my photo archive. 4) Store ripped DVDs A puny CPU would b...

I've dug up my notes about Asus's regular D510 board and the temperatures are between 5C and 9C higher when the board is positioned horizontally (using a very open case without a fan). The heatsink looks similar to the one that comes with that Ion board. The low-power boards tend to have smaller hea...

Jetway had N270 boards at least. They've recently released a N550 board which is somewhat unique because it's a mobile dual-core. I don't know if anyone else has one. It doesn't look like it's got a PCIe slot however.

I don't know if that power supply would fit your case, sorry. You may want a power supply that's more efficient at 5% load (assuming that such power supplies exist) or a less powerful PS because your system is probably going to spend a lot of time using very little power (assuming your drives are al...

What do you mean by a mobile Atom board? I mean the ones with Atom CPUs which have lower TDPs. Ion laptops have them I think but all Ion boards I've seen use desktop Atom CPUs. Maybe the Ion chipset is efficient once the graphics are disabled. But, if memory serves, Ion boards are less efficient th...

I have little experience with transcoding but this topic isn't getting any replies... Transcoding in real-time might of course be a problem depending on what codecs are involved and hardware support. But it might also be a problem with a more powerful CPU. Atom ain't far behind some of the other, mo...

A slower Atom board should consume less power, especially if it's a mobile board but those are expensive.

I have no experience with that case or that board but since you've got no reply... You can read about our experiences running fanless Atom systems on the forum. You're likely to get very high temperatures unless you're using mobile boards (unlike that Ion) or very open cases. Drilling a few holes in...

The point of going with Atom is to get a system that has at least two of these characteristics: -fanless -very small -very cheap As far as I can determine, the Asus has none of these characteristics. It seems rather expensive for what you get in fact. Current Atom-Ion systems have a flawed architect...

Efficiency of power supplies matter a great deal when comparing idle power comsumptions which are only a few W apart. At a given price point, the Atom solution will generally consume substantially less energy (at the cost of lower performance). Be careful not to compare apples and organges. I unders...

single-platter drives are more reliable even when they don't sustain shocks

Dear OP, You don't give enough information to determine your needs. But I'd say this: A D510MO is probably overkill for your FTP/web server but it's cheap and easy to work with. Sure, you can build something that uses less power, but it would cost more money and/or be trouble unless you want to go f...

It would be unwise to try to make a complete WHS system backup; I doubt there's any way to do it w/off the shelf solutions. We expressed early on in that section that DATA should be backed up, not the WHS system. If you set up your server with a separate small system partition (as you should), you ...

Is it possible to buy current motherboards+CPU with 10W idle or less, Atom or other x86? As others have stated, the chipset matters. Mobile gear is designed to consume less power. There are low-power Atom chipsets. You'll recognize them by the CPU deisgnation which starts with Z. These consume a go...

I'm not the most qualified to answer this but nobody bothered so... RAM: 4GB DDR2 RAID: Highpoint RocketRaid 3560 - just waiting for it to go on sale, wanted RAID-6 and expandability. probably overkill (and the hardware RAID might mean trouble) HDD: 8x SAMSUNG F4-EG 2TB - got them for $80 CDN each (...

One of the external articles linked at the end of my piece describes fascinating new findings in tinnitus research. http://discovermagazine.com/2010/oct/26-ringing-in-the-ears-goes-much-deeper It's less about ringing in the ear, rather it's in the brain, and it diminished when scientists "edited re...

I didn't answer until now because I don't use ESX but since no one else chimed in... You don't say what CPU features you want, how fast a CPU you want and how much RAM you want. There are people who run ESX on something as puny as an HP Microserver. And people are running ESX on cheap AMD hardware. ...

We really have more data now (arguing this point is silly, frankly) and not all problems have easy solutions. Perhaps you'll have an easier time looking at examples in cases where ZFS is less safe than simple filesystems. We know there are drives which lie about committing data to their platters (or...

Just because you're the best doesn't mean you can't do better. Did I mention another site doing better work? I wouldn't be posting this if you didn't care about low-power. But I think you could care more. A couple of examples: I mentionned the D510MO. This was kind of a breakthrough when it comes to...

This, too, shall pass Can't argue with that. Worth engraving on a ring. But I'll take issue with the following: So we should stick reviewing low power fanless devices that don't need our expertise for people to know they're quiet? Which fanless devices? How many people are using tablets or smartpho...

ZFS isn't the only thing which crashes if you runs it without having enough memory. But the OP plans to use 8G I think... is that not a lot more than enough? but a redundant solution is redundant. We already have a good solution to the problem of hard drive reliability, it's called RAID (except 0 of...

I agree about the false sense of security. And about warning people against using ZFS (or other high-end filesystems like xfs for that matter) on dubious hardware or if they don't have adequate skill, good backup procedures and so on. I also agree ideal systems would be preferable to band-aid soluti...

My point was that any such error will either be massive and immediately noticeable (like your case below) or very likely will corrupt all copies of the data making ZFS unable to repair. How do you know that? Unlike ECC, the main value of ZFS lies in error detection anyway. The fact of the matter is...

I know I'm going to catch some flack for this, but when was the last time you ever had a modern HD return the wrong data, when you can guarantee the correct data was written in the first place ? I'm not talking about bad sectors or other failures that cause the HD to fail to return data, but actual...

So you're not claiming that you can determine that 99% of drives reallocate sectors based on SMART counters or logs. And you're not claiming that the reason SMART fails to predict failures is that its thresholds are not as agressive as those of the software you use to convince your customers to pay ...

The variables that the report mostly expands on -scan errors*, various reallocation types - seem to be related more to the drive's disk surface than the reading/writing, rotating mechanism... Unless I read the report hastily, it seemed to me these were more clearly related to disk failure probabili...

I ordered with the MicroServer the optional "Micro Server Remote Access Card Kit". I can't find ANY information about it online, but I'm hoping it's something like IPMI. It appears to include its own ethernet port, so if it's gigE and I use it intelligently maybe I can set up a dedicated link betwe...

MoJo, the bit of analysis Pierre fetched very much contradicts a naive reading what you said! Exponential usually refers to something like failures rates of 2% the first year, 4% the second, 8% the thrid, 16% the fourth and so on. The reason SMART usually fails to warn is that most failures can not ...