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Comment by silversmith | Hacker News Reader

This seems like the ideal home server solution - powerful enough to run backup solutions / media server for couple people, small enough to fit wherever you want it to.

I recently went with a mini-itx BayTrail-D solution as my BTSync / Plex server - a breath of fresh air after year of fighting with ARM board in the same role. This would have been even better, as it would allow me to maintain the same form factor, instead of making way for comparatively bulky mITX case.

The only thing I'd like to know is how would you power a SATA drive attached to this?

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I'm using an ifc6410 board as a home server, and as long as you stay with 2.5" disks all you need is 5V. The ifc and as it seems the Minnowboard as well provide 5V, so all you have to do is build your own adapter to SATA power. I just repurposed an old molex to SATA power adapter.

For 3.5" disks you also need +12V, so the easiest way would be to gut an external USB disk enclosure.

This should be a great replacement for my D510MO [1] Mini-ITX home server. It's slightly weaker in CPU speed, but it should be completely fanless and even smaller. For my needs, it should still be plenty enough.

[1] http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/motherboards/desktop-...

There are external power supplies available that connect directly to a disk. I would be more skeptical regarding I/O-performance. As far as I can see, there are only two SATA-ports available.

For a cheap x86 NAS, you might want to look out for the Asrock Q1900DC which was presented at CeBit this year and is supposed to come out soon.

It has 4x2ghz Intel Celeron J1900, 4 SATA2 and 2 SATA3 ports and 19V DC input, so no more need for a bulky ATX power supply (though for a NAS you need to find a way to power those hard disks).

Judging from the prices that similarly specced boards are fetching (between 50-70€), this one should be below 100€ as well.

Here is a slide from the Asrock CeBit presentation with the specs: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-1wOiaMWiiXw/Ux7HGzZAl6I/AAAAAAAAHQ...

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