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Comment by markdennehy | Hacker News Reader

Ex-enterprise gear or a retired or second-hand PC would indeed be easier on the wallet and able to do the job. However, since I had neither, nor a way to get either...

And yes, Atom builds could handle NAS loads easily enough, no disagreement there; but add in the backups and other tasks, and you'll start reaching the limits of the platform. This isn't just a NAS box, this is the main server for the house.

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You are willing to ship things based on this build, so don't be to quick to dismiss. eBay, Craiglist, and other regional list sites are the go to places. Say you spend $400 USD equivalent on an older Opteron system and a generous $200 to ship it. You're still coming out ahead and would have a higher quality engineered system IMHO. Just something to consider in the future.

NAS, backups, web development, etc aren't going to stress an atom. I/O will be your enemy far sooner in most conceivable server scenarios until wide RAID arrays or SSDs enter the picture.

In the US, I'd definitely be going with newegg, craigs and other places kev; but in Ireland, well, places like scan are about as good as it gets. Ebay is an option as well, but the build takes longer; I have a week's vacation to get this done in for various personal reasons - so having the parts here now is worth the 10% I'd save on average if I spent a month hunting down bits on ebay and shipping them seperately.

And buying an older system on ebay and shipping it... er, no, I wouldn't be doing that locally in Ireland. I'd get an overpriced, heavily kicked system unless I was very lucky, and to quote a google sysop, hope is not an acceptable plan :D

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