New favorite mobo

[gharris999]

Sorry if this sounds like a plug, but I just picked up one of these: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131843

6 (!) SATA III ports on a passively cooled, 64bit mini-itx mobo that supports 8gb of ram for $79. Not too shabby.

I literally had ALL the other parts here on the shelf, recycled from old projects: case, memory, drives, cables, etc.

I'm using this case: http://www.logicsupply.com/products/a7879 ..which I don't think I would recommend, but hey..it was just sitting there gathering dust.

I now have a nice, headless box running ubuntu server 12.04 x86_64 with a 4x2TB raid5 soft array and with an esata port for hooking up external drives.

So far, this seems like a perfectly capable mobo for use as a lms/squeezeboxserver + general purpose NAS platform.

For anyone interesting in building on this platform, I'd advise going with this case: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811112339, using this power-supply: http://www.endpcnoise.com/cgi-bin/e/...t_power_supply. You need a 'shorty' power-supply with that case to keep from impinging on the internal drive mounts.

Even if you're not interested in building a big raid box and only plan on mounting one or two drives in a smaller case, at $79, this mobo still seems like a decent choice. This is SO much cheaper and SO much more capable than all the Via EPIA and atom based mini-itx boards I've used over the years.

And WOL worked out of the box. No fiddling beyond a single simple BIOS setting.

[dsdreamer]

The MOBO looks like something I would buy to play with for sure. But, what about this case and PSU? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811165505

This would keep my costs down, and since the PSU is external I wouldn't have to worry about impinging mechanically. The total cost is much lower than your picks for case and PSU. Do you see a flaw in my choice?

[gharris999]

The MOBO looks like something I would buy to play with for sure. But, what about this case and PSU? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16811165505

This would keep my costs down, and since the PSU is external I wouldn't have to worry about impinging mechanically. The total cost is much lower than your picks for case and PSU. Do you see a flaw in my choice?

Re flaws: No, none, if that's the way you want to go. The cases I linked to are for folks who intend to build a raid nas device with 4 or 5 internal 3.5" drives. The case you linked to, according to the specs, can only fit a single 2.5" laptop drive. So, unless you hook up an external drive, you're probably talking about max 1TB of storage. That may be perfectly adequate for many folks. My music & video collection is now pushing 3TBs so that wouldn't work for me.

[gharris999]

I'm sorry to say that I'm qualifying my endorsement of the ASUS C60M1-I motherboard for the time being. There seems to be a bug in the x86_64 driver for the on-board nic which makes WOL flakey. See: http://askubuntu.com/questions/13484...le-wake-on-lan

The very simple recipe to replace the driver that I found at the end of this post: http://askubuntu.com/questions/13484...le-wake-on-lan

..got WOL working for me again with Ubuntu 12.04 x86_64.

wget http://r8168.googlecode.com/files/r8168-8.030.00.tar.bz2
tar xjf r8168-8.030.00.tar.bz2
cd r8168-8.030.00
sudo ./autorun.sh

Oddly, the newer, 8.032 driver didn't fix the problem for me. But the 8.030 driver referenced above seems to have the WOL problem licked.

The upstream bug report on this is here: https://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=42849

An alternative, and nearly identical (but at $119, more expensive) mobo is this one: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...97&Tpk=E35M1-I

This is the mobo I'm using in my current 'production' LMS server. WOL has been rock-solid from day one with that board, using the stock kernal nic driver. This is somewhat surprising as the only difference between the nics in the two motherboards is the revision number of the Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168B PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controller. The C60M1-I uses rev 09 and the E35M1-I uses rev 06.

Go figure.