Hi all,

I've been thinking of building myself a home media / NAS box for a while now and was wondering if you lot could could provide some advice.

Key aims are power efficiency and silence, and something small enough to sit on a bookshelf. Was thinking of building the following:
* Intel Atom 330 mobo combo http://www.lambda-tek.com/componentshop/index.pl?prodID=1606310
* 2gb of DDR
* Compucase Mini ITX case http://www.ebuyer.com/product/156186
* 1TB Samsung "ECO Green" [url]hdd http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/1TB-Sams ... -89-ms-NCQ[/url]

All I want to it to do is act as a file server and run some music server software (like SquuzeServer). I realise that because of the case I can't do raid but I've got a good backup in place to cover that. I also realise that I won't be streaming any HD video with it but at the moment that's not a concern.

I'd probably want to change the northbridge cooler on the MB to a passive heatsink but that's the general gist of it. Does anyone have any thoughts? Is there anything I could do better?

Cheers

A.

2GB of RAM is probably overkill for a simple fileserver/NAS box. Saying that, RAM is so cheap now it may not be worth buying anything less. Other than that, IMO it isn't too bad but I can't say I know a great deal about home servers.

I wouldn't bank on it - if you plan to run a streaming software like TVersity or Twonky they are resource hungry little things - I use the former to feed media from my workstation to my 360 and it can quite happily chew its way through to 200-300MB of memory in an evening's music and movies.