So, eight years ago I built my first dedicated home server, based on a Norco chassis, which has 20 hot-swappable drive bays at the front, another two internal 3.5" bays, and a slim optical drive bay. I thought I could avoid the expense of SAS and just use a bunch of dirt-cheap SATA controllers, which had served me well in my previous server that was a repurposed tower PC. I went with an ASUS E35M1-M Pro motherboard with integrated AMD E-350 APU (18W TDP), combined with a SYBA 4-port SATA PCI-E card and a SYBA/IOCrest 8-port PCI-E card. Since I'm finally starting to max out the number of SATA ports I currently have, I just ordered another of the 8-port cards, which will replace the 4-port card.
Anyways, the E-350 based server has done its job pretty well for 8 years now, but obviously it was extremely slow to start with, and given its age, I was thinking I'd look around and see if there is a modern upgrade for it? What has me scratching my head, though, is that from what I can tell, the Intel Atom and equivalent AMD APU's have essentially disappeared except for laptop platforms. I see laptop Atoms that are x86-64 with better performance and lower TDP than the E-350, but they only seem to be made for mobile platforms.
I'm wondering if there are any good options these days for very low power home server motherboard/CPU's?
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Nerva
So, eight years ago I built my first dedicated home server, based on a Norco chassis, which has 20 hot-swappable drive bays at the front, another two internal 3.5" bays, and a slim optical drive bay. I thought I could avoid the expense of SAS and just use a bunch of dirt-cheap SATA controllers, which had served me well in my previous server that was a repurposed tower PC. I went with an ASUS E35M1-M Pro motherboard with integrated AMD E-350 APU (18W TDP), combined with a SYBA 4-port SATA PCI-E card and a SYBA/IOCrest 8-port PCI-E card. Since I'm finally starting to max out the number of SATA ports I currently have, I just ordered another of the 8-port cards, which will replace the 4-port card.
Anyways, the E-350 based server has done its job pretty well for 8 years now, but obviously it was extremely slow to start with, and given its age, I was thinking I'd look around and see if there is a modern upgrade for it? What has me scratching my head, though, is that from what I can tell, the Intel Atom and equivalent AMD APU's have essentially disappeared except for laptop platforms. I see laptop Atoms that are x86-64 with better performance and lower TDP than the E-350, but they only seem to be made for mobile platforms.
I'm wondering if there are any good options these days for very low power home server motherboard/CPU's?
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