We've had a hard drive connected to a Linksys WRT350N wireless router running Linux for about 6 months, making it possible to do automatic Time Machine backups whenever the Macs are on at home. It's like backups should be, completely seamless, but the router is unfortunately quite flaky and tends to lock up under load. With the new Intel Atom, you can now get a pretty low power x86_64 processor with motherboard for 80 bucks -- time to upgrade.

The board is an Intel D945GCLF2 with a dual-core Atom 330 processor. It's using a hand-me-down 1GB ram stick from my desktop machine, and the WD 1TB GreenPower drive. With the PicoPSU power supply, the machine draws 29W idle, and marginally more under load.

Getting a good case wasn't so easy. I read about the Apex MI-008 on Silent PC Review. With the hard drive screwed into the metal mounts, the thin metal steel case made a terrible racket when the drive seeked, so modifications were necessary. I also wanted to fit 2 drives, since our 1TB drive is basically full.

The solution was to pillage the unused components for my P180 case for the desktop machine. It has two hard drive racks, where the drives are soft-mounted on silicone bushings and slides on plastic rails. One of these trays is unused (and the space where it's supposed to go is taken by the pump for the water cooling), so I slaughtered it to make it fit in the MI-008. It worked nicely, and it's practically inaudible now.

. All in all, I think it's a success. The machine is stable and works as a file server, iTunes server, and a router doing traffic shaping.

Update: In 2011, we ran out of space. This box was retired and replaced by a much larger Sandy Bridge box (that's not using much more power, except the hard drives) that runs a 6-drive ZFS network file system. Hopefully those 10 TB will last a while.

D945GCLF2	P180 rails	Rails	With drives	_MG_1767	Tight fit
Tight fit