I am going to be spending the next month or so building an OSX fileserver.

The features:
• Hardware raid
• Low power consumption (well kinda low)
• Leopard Server installed
• Time machine backups from other macs in the house
• Media server to stream music and videos to other computers
• Torrents

Hardware outline:

• Motherboard: Asus P5K-EPU - $119AU
This board is pretty cheap, being one of the reasons I bought it. The other being that it has an ASUS EPU (Lets hope this brings the power consumption down). It also has two full size PCIe slots which I will need. I've installed one system with this board so far and all was well. It's completely compatible and has all the features I need.

• Case: Lian Li PC-A77 - $359AU
This thing is not cheap. But it does have room for 12+ HD's. It also has built in thermal sensors and fan monitoring, which is pretty cool for a server build. Plus it looks like a server.

• RAID: Rocketraid 2320 - $559AU
The cheaper and not as fast variant of Highpoint's great Leopard compatible PCIe hardware raid cards. It has 8 ports and Online Capacity Expansion (hopefully) meaning I can add more disks to the array at a later stage.

• CPU: Intel 5200 or 5300 - $115AU
Now this is one thing I'm not set on just yet. Ideally I want something with L2 stepping as it apparently brings idle power usage down to 8-12W compared to the 22W of most intel CPUs.

• COOLER: Zalman 9500
Good cooler to keep my CPU on top of the moon. I already own one.

• RAM: 4GB 800
I have the 4GB lying around. It's generic ram (Apacer I think).

• PSU: No Ideas yet?
Something I'm going to be looking into.

• HARDDISKS: For the array itself I plan to go with 4x5400RPM 1TB Western Digital Drives. They claim to be energy efficient. Perhaps I should be going with 7200 drives for a server though? The system itself will run on a 7200RPM drive separate to the array.

•GPU: 8600 Gigabyte
I also have this lying around so I best use it. Not sure how well it will impact on the energy front though.



Tell me what you think....