Seriously — laptop disks in a server?

  It might sound strange, but laptop disks actually have a lot of 
  advantages for an always-on home server: they use less energy, run 
  very quiet, and take up little space. Although you pay roughly 
  double the price per gigabyte compared to 3.5" disks, you pay less 
  for electricity, and thus save money in the long run.

In any event, the disks in a home storage server are going to be spending most of their time spun down, and drawing very little power.

Very nice. Looks fantastic.

Put a second Ethernet port on it and let me use it as a NAS/Router box. That would be really cool. I'd like a NAS, but I'd also desperately like to ditch my DSL router.

What's the average (idle) power draw like? The PSU is rated for 20W (output, I guess). This seems to be just enough, since current 2.5" drives draw up to 4W when starting (are you doing a staggered spinup?). For a single drive, idle consumption should be below 1W. So I guess idle power should be way below 10W? More like 5W? That sounds good for an always-on appliance.

At those loads, I'm sure the system is virtually silent, particularly given the humongous fan. The fan grill looks like it would block a huge amount of the airflow, but I guess it's not much of an issue. Does the fan pull air in or blow it out? It would be really nice if everything could go no-moving-parts during idle periods, ie. fan turned off and all HDDs spun down.

Sadly, even with a second ethernet port, I probably won't be in the market, it's just too expensive for me. But I'm sure you'll be able to sell a few batches to the MBP toting internet nouveaux riches in Berlin. :) As a bonus, it's small enough to bring along to the Wifi equipped coffee shop. SCNR.

Regardless of whether this is the "best" solution for everyone, I'm excited to see people trying these ideas, open sourcing their designs and creating space for there to even be a discussion like this.

Pardon the cheesy line, but it's a move from just reviewing hardware to being able to actually revise it if you don't like something the original designer decided to do.

So, I'm guessing from the specs on the page the hardware is:

SheevaPlug - http://www.globalscaletechnologies.com/p-22-sheevaplug-dev-k...

Then some sort of 1 to 5 eSATA / SATA multiplier like this - http://www.amazon.com/5-Port-Port-SATA-II-Multiplier-SiI4726... . I didn't know these even existed until I was trying to figure out how you attached the 5 drives to 1 eSATA port. I'm guessing this is powered by running a connection over from the Sheevaplug

120 MM Fan

Then all of the metalwork and clips. I like the design on that.

This definitely something I am going to build to decommission the ATOM nettop I am currently using to share a stack of external drives.

The design is nice, but why buy this thing for €429 excl. disks if you can buy a Synology DS211 with 2x2GB for the same price including the great diskstation software? Ok, the design is nice, but hey, it's a NAS, you can just go ahead and hide it somewhere, there's no real need for it to be on a desk or in a living room.

Some interesting links I found while searching for a low-power server/NAS for myself:

8.5W Core i3-based desktop computer http://ssj3gohan.tweakblogs.net/blog/6112/85w-core-i3-based-...

(from wikipedia: core-i5 mac mini consumes 13W while idle, core2duo model uses 10W)

building a 8x2TB NAS http://www.willudesign.com/BlackDwarfTop.html

Yeah, there are quite a few — but do they really look good next to your MacBook Pro?

The drobo does. This looks like a machine shop class project.

This is awesome, but totally overpriced. It's a shame, because this is exactly the sort of hardware people need to start using in the home. I suspect the case is slightly overengineered - an extruded aluminium case may have even given a better finish. Also, Ubuntu on a NAS? Overkill?

That's a pretty unique interior setup. I built my own living room server that has comparable power usage (uses ~20 W from the wall in practice) with more traditional computer parts. I'm so used to the x86/x86-64 options of Intel, AMD, and Via that I have never considered building my own system with something other than x86.

With low power/heat/noise as importance factors, one's x86 options are very limited. I went with an Intel Atom for my own build, which resulted in very limited choices for motherboards as far as number of SATA ports, hardware RAID controllers (for redundancy), etc.

I am very interested now to see what options I might have now to build my own ARM server.

I just setup my Tonidoplug yesterday (based on the same basic technology from what I understand). Primarily as a backup server, but the sharing between pc, laptop and mobiles is definitely cool: http://www.tonidoplug.com/tonido_plug.html

not to ruin the spirit of this post/project, but if you're looking into a low power, inexpensive home server why not consider an old laptop with a few USB drives?

With an old laptop you get battery backup (UPS) for free. Bonus points if you find a super cheap one with a broken display.

Disclaimer: I've been doing this for years and it rocks.

This would be sweet for running CrashPlan on. Are there other SAN solutions that work with CrashPlan? I looked about 2 years ago and didn't find a good option (to me, good = I don't have to leave my computer on all the time).

Very nice, is it possible to boost the RAM to 1 GiB without ruining the whole design?

This box would be perfect with FreeBSD + ZFS (as you say in the text).

I can't find the schematics for it, despite them apparently being CC licensed.

Cool but way too expensive.

I can't open the site. First I cot a server error, now it loads forever. =) HN strikes again.

anyone else notice this site has a Poor rating on Senderbase?

Probably obvious for the server folks, but can you tell how you created the enclosure? Is there a company in Berlin?