Thanks, let me know what you find. I am overseas for the next few weeks anyway, so can’t look at the BIOS screens till I get back.
If it weren’t for my better half, who swore she could hear the fan in my old server, I would’ve skipped the passive cooling. But OTOH my current Streacom case looks nice, and it does seem to work perfectly well as long as you don’t push the TDP. My issue with the Intel mb are related to their refusal to release drivers for Windows Server for what they consider to be client mb’s.
Found an interesting new series of products this morning. Intro: I have 3 separate systems, one in my main living room, one in my office upstairs, and one in overseas apartment. In the house I sort of prefer to have independent servers with their own storage rather than stream from a NAS, mainly for single-point-of-failure reasons. The main system I try to make as balls-to-the-wall (what does that phrase mean, anyway? :)) as I can afford, and that I think is sane. So far I have been building my own boxes for servers in that system. In the other systems I shoot for reliability and try to see what I can do with reasonable budgets. So I just found these:
They are all made by the same company, Compulab, about which i know nothing, but they have gotten high marks on Amazon.
I especially like the airtop-d, for the following reasons:
Pre-configured with Linux mint; no need to hunt down drivers or worry about whether the kernel likes your hardware, no need to pay Bill Gates for a Windows license. (I have been using JRiver on Mint on an old Dell laptop in my office and it works fine.)
Fanless (not ultra-important to me really but it’s nice to have!)
Cool vertical case to save shelf space
Can take 2 internal drives, one for the OS and one for the music files.
Plenty of power
The downside is that they are not all that cheap; you could definitely roll your own fanless box for less, I think, but this might be a nice solution if you don’t want the hassle. Power is 19vdc so should be usable with a linear power supply like the HDPlex. The Mintbox 2 is a lot cheaper and should also work well.
Obviously I haven’t tried one of these but they did catch my eye as being fairly nicely-designed, especially the Airtop. Anybody here used any of these?
Well, some days you just feel money burning a hole in your pocket. Ordered one of these - will give it a shot with Linux Mint and JRiver, maybe also Daphile or Volumio if I feel adventurous.
