Hacker News Reader

Comment by thingie | Hacker News Reader

Well, I wonder if it would be suitable as some kind of low-power all-in-one home server (file sharing, irc in screen, not much more), network router and jukebox and movie player. In theory, specs are ok for that purpose, but from the remark "if you need more than 1GB, you're probably doing it wrong", it seems that, hm, I'd be doing it wrong, because 1GB isn't exactly a lot of memory and it'd be wise to put there more.

(And of course, USB might not be the ideal bus to connect a lot of disk space.)

View on HN

Don't bother.

I got a Lenovo q150 for $200 and replaced the disk with the consumer intel 40gb sad for another $100. It is tiny, quiet, and consumes 17 watts.

The Q150 looks amazing (though $350-$399 from their website: http://shop.lenovo.com/us/landing_pages/ideacentre/2010/q150 - you can even mount on the VESA bracket)

Any idea how to get it in Australia? Lenovo's au site doesn't list it; and I guess there'd be power-supply (and maybe IP?) issues.

I got the one without HDMI (who cares, for a server?) which is a lot cheaper. Not sure what else it is missing. It was $210.

I got it from Amazon. Can you order from Amazon? This is what I got: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003SCI59K

EDIT: The one I have isn't an nvidia ION-based machine.

thanks! unfortunately it says as I feared: Lenovo IdeaCentre Q150 Desktop PC - Black (40813AU) cannot be shipped to the selected address. (BTW: most things are OK for us with Amazon.)

1GB is 1GB of RAM. It doesn't seem to have onboard ROM, but SD slot surely will support up to 32GB. And it has 10/100 Ethernet besides USB, though latter is probably suitable enough to "connect a lot of disk space".

I know, but 1GB of RAM isn't that lot if I want at least reasonably fast file sharing (especially if the primary storage would be the harddisks via USB), run some network services and even some desktops apps via networked X11, which is roughly what I want (so I'm asking if this is the 'doing it wrong' case).

I would guess you are overestimating the memory footprint of your applications (unless you are planning on running Eclipse/Firefox/etc.) on the box.

USB2.0 will push 480Mb/sec which is probably sufficient for streaming content.

My wireless router has 64MB of ram and is capable of running as a NAS device if you plug a USB enclosure into it.

Only time you would run into issues is if you were using something like ZFS that keeps an in memory ARC cache. If you want to run X11 apps, just get a linux computer.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com