FIT PC2
The FIT is so small you can Velcro it to the back of your monitor. Stick a 500GB or 750GB 2.5" laptop drive in it an under full load it only draws about 6 watts.
I put a 30GB OCZ SSD in it as the boot drive. The reason for this is that there are no moving parts which makes it 100% silent while idling and it also generates less heat. My music resides on 2 external 500GB laptop drives; again less heat and noise. Under full load with all three drive "spinning" it draws about 8-9 watts. I've had no problems with it serving 5 simultaneous streams to computers and squeezeboxes around the house. I run it headless and it sits on a shelf above my main PC. I control squeezecenter from my main PC and on the occasional time I need to do maintenance on the OS, I just unplug the monitor and keyboard/mouse from my PC and plug it into the fit.
In the past I used a FlipStart PC as a music server. Again, I had all my music residing on external hard drives. The problem I had with the Flipstart was that the fan it in made a small amount of noise while idling and even more noise while serving music. In addition, I had to keep it in a place where it was assessable to do maintenance. Finally, under full load it drew about 35 watts with all drives spinning.
The FIT is so small you can Velcro it to the back of your monitor. Stick a 500GB or 750GB 2.5" laptop drive in it an under full load it only draws about 6 watts.
I put a 30GB OCZ SSD in it as the boot drive. The reason for this is that there are no moving parts which makes it 100% silent while idling and it also generates less heat. My music resides on 2 external 500GB laptop drives; again less heat and noise. Under full load with all three drive "spinning" it draws about 8-9 watts. I've had no problems with it serving 5 simultaneous streams to computers and squeezeboxes around the house. I run it headless and it sits on a shelf above my main PC. I control squeezecenter from my main PC and on the occasional time I need to do maintenance on the OS, I just unplug the monitor and keyboard/mouse from my PC and plug it into the fit.
In the past I used a FlipStart PC as a music server. Again, I had all my music residing on external hard drives. The problem I had with the Flipstart was that the fan it in made a small amount of noise while idling and even more noise while serving music. In addition, I had to keep it in a place where it was assessable to do maintenance. Finally, under full load it drew about 35 watts with all drives spinning.