After a good amount of time I have come up with my preferred hardware setup for my fileserver. I have a couple of old harddrives laying around so I won’t need them. I also don’t want to build in a CD-ROM drive permanently. I will use an external one for setup.
The German PC Builder site of Alternate is very good and has some nice checks built-in to prevent an incompatible setup. I looked always for the cheapest components.
CPU
AMD Sempron64 LE-1250 Boxed, OPGA, “Sparta”
with bundled cooling system. Although it’s single-core it can run in 64-Bit mode and should not get too warm.
30,99 €
Power
Zalman ZM360B-APS
With 4 S-ATA power connectors.
49,99 €
Case
Sharkoon Rebel9 Economy-Edition
Plenty of space for 9 external 5.25″ drives in a midi sized tower(200 mm x 435 mm x 486 mm).
41,99 €
Case cooling
Arctic-Cooling AF8025 PWM
(3,99 x 2) 7,98 €
Mainboard
Asrock N61P-S
It has 4 S-ATA connectors on a NVIDIA nForce6. The build-in LAN is only 100-MBit, but I want to connect the fileserver via PowerLAN so that should be enough. Although it is not listed on Sun’s Solaris hardware compatibility list I try my luck with it.
36,49 €
RAM
Crucial DIMM 2 GB DDR2-667
The single-core CPU can only handle this type of RAM, but I guess that will be sufficient.
19,79 €
Complete
That’s it for the bare system.
187,14 €
From the site:
Agile Developer, Berlin, Germany 
I’m thinking of using the Asrock N61P-S for a Linux file server (ClarkConnect 4.3) as well. I wonder if it worked for you with Sun’s Solaris or if you tried an other distribution or small business server?
I also wonder if I could down-clock the cpu so it won’t need a fan and can be passively cooled? Did you try this perhaps? I’m thinking on placing the system below the house so noise isn’t a issue, but dust and spiderwebs are. The less moveable parts (fans) the better 🙂
Nice thing of the Asrock is it has a serial port, so an UPS can be connected using usb or serial.
Solaris was my first choice especially because of ZFS.
Passive cooling would be nice but I am planning to place it next to our freezer which is not quiet so that is not so important.
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Searching a bit further I discovered ClarkConnect 4.2 and onwards support the nForce 430 chipset so I gave it a try. If it wouldn’t work I’d push the system to my dad 🙂
I bought:
Asrock, N61P-S, GeForce 6150SE, DDR2, m-ATX, PCI-E, VGA [EUR 42,00]
AMD, Athlon 64 LE-1640, Box, 512 kb, AM2, 2600 MHz [EUR 38,50]
Kingston, 2 GB, 2x 1 GB, PC-5300, 667 MHz, CL5, DDR2, kit [EUR 22,50]
X-Gear, Laque XLQ480K, 400W, Middle Tower, zwart, ATX [EUR 39,00]
Total: 142 euros
Fortunately it works like a charm. It’s a quick replacement for a PII system that died on me two weekends ago. I just added the two harddrives from the old system to the new one. ClarkConnect detected the change in the hardware.
It consumes about 50W. It has not been doint par/unrar yet… so I have to check on that. In the future I wish to look at the power consumption. I’m thinking of fiddling with underclocking/undervolting and perhaps an other power supply. But so far so good!
Maybe a Sempron would not that be power hungry in your case…
Did you have any trouble getting your fileserver up and running? I’m considering a similar build based on the Asrock N61P-S, but as you mentioned, it’s not on Sun’s Solaris hardware compatibility list.
I have not built it yet, still have to think it over thoroughly. I will write another post as soon as I have built it.
How is it going with this project? I am considering replacing my old PC at home with a setup like yours. From which online shop did you get those prices?
I am still planning 😉 and will post a new article as soon as I got the hardware.
The prices were from http://www.alternate.de.
Cheers
Markus