Cupboards and Eden
Last weekend I was very busy. Had a pub crawl, Sin City to watch, and a set of fitted bedroom cupboards to construct. Now that most of the cupboards are up and all trace of hangovers has gone, I can turn my attention to my latest toy: a Via Mini-ITX Eden motherboard.
I decided with all my power worries of earlier to go with a fanless low power server. Stack it full of harddrives and put it in a cupboard (not in the bedroom though!) Having finally been in when it was delivered I now have it sitting in front of me. And very dinky it is too. Unfortunatly the PCI riser card may be a bit of a chocolate teapot, as most of the board is covered in heatsinks, which block the port the riser lives in. Size was not important to me, but with a control I can put 10 Hds (8 ATAs and 2 SATAs) on this board. I worked out I have about 14, so I'll probably need another at some point ;). Splitting up one power hungry server into many small servers seems like a good idea, as long as the suspend modes work properly.
My Athlon XP-M that I was preping for duty has proven to be rather unreliable in this regard. 1 in 5 times it fails to resume. Not good for a machine that is to be asleep most of the time! It seems to be the HD resume that causes it the problems, so I'll continue to experiment. However one thing was for sure: I couldn't use it as I intended.
The Eden M/bs are too slow for serious media playback. Yes there are things you can do, but I like the flexibility raw grunt gives you when picking your codecs. The new C7 maybe a different story, but until they are released I have to have two machines. Mine is an 800MHz fanless, so its pretty gutless. Still it should do for running the background tasks like DNS, Bittorrent and the like. Best thing is if they go nuts and max the CPU, it'll only draw 20W. A nice artifical cap!
It'll probably take me a while to make the change. I want to be sure that this thing is going to work properly, so I'll do it in stages. First build a booting machine, then add drives and see how it goes. My venerable PIV has been a most reliable machine. Not fast, but solid. This has value. I've had bad experience with Via stuff before, so if it turns out to be a dog, I'll retire it to the bin. Fingers crossed it will work ok.
If all goes according to plan I'll get another one to run Linux. I'd like to get some hand on experience with keeping that sucker up and running. However I know from past experience its a huge time sink, and not what I want to run any "critical" systems on yet. I get the impression that Linux may actually run better on these EPIA things than windows, so maybe a Linux active directory and samba server is in order...
I decided with all my power worries of earlier to go with a fanless low power server. Stack it full of harddrives and put it in a cupboard (not in the bedroom though!) Having finally been in when it was delivered I now have it sitting in front of me. And very dinky it is too. Unfortunatly the PCI riser card may be a bit of a chocolate teapot, as most of the board is covered in heatsinks, which block the port the riser lives in. Size was not important to me, but with a control I can put 10 Hds (8 ATAs and 2 SATAs) on this board. I worked out I have about 14, so I'll probably need another at some point ;). Splitting up one power hungry server into many small servers seems like a good idea, as long as the suspend modes work properly.
My Athlon XP-M that I was preping for duty has proven to be rather unreliable in this regard. 1 in 5 times it fails to resume. Not good for a machine that is to be asleep most of the time! It seems to be the HD resume that causes it the problems, so I'll continue to experiment. However one thing was for sure: I couldn't use it as I intended.
The Eden M/bs are too slow for serious media playback. Yes there are things you can do, but I like the flexibility raw grunt gives you when picking your codecs. The new C7 maybe a different story, but until they are released I have to have two machines. Mine is an 800MHz fanless, so its pretty gutless. Still it should do for running the background tasks like DNS, Bittorrent and the like. Best thing is if they go nuts and max the CPU, it'll only draw 20W. A nice artifical cap!
It'll probably take me a while to make the change. I want to be sure that this thing is going to work properly, so I'll do it in stages. First build a booting machine, then add drives and see how it goes. My venerable PIV has been a most reliable machine. Not fast, but solid. This has value. I've had bad experience with Via stuff before, so if it turns out to be a dog, I'll retire it to the bin. Fingers crossed it will work ok.
If all goes according to plan I'll get another one to run Linux. I'd like to get some hand on experience with keeping that sucker up and running. However I know from past experience its a huge time sink, and not what I want to run any "critical" systems on yet. I get the impression that Linux may actually run better on these EPIA things than windows, so maybe a Linux active directory and samba server is in order...
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