My new 260£ living-room-compatible NAS/HTPC

My first attempt at building a small silent HTPC (home theater pc) began and ended a couple of years ago with a mini-itx Pentium M board sitting bare and caseless on a cupboard in our living room. It worked quite well, but I never came around to building a case for it (back then mini itx cases were rare and expensive). When our daughter was born I decided that uncovered electronics and a baby were probably not going to mix well and exchanged it (the computer, that is) for a Mac Mini (the first Intel model had just come out).

I was delighted when I first discovered Front Row only to be severely disappointed only shortly thereafter by its lack of features and general bugginess. Nevertheless the Mini worked at least as well as a HTPC as the naked Pentium M had (especially after I had put Linux on it) and it was a lot prettier.

All was well until the Mini's hard drive *and* CD drive broke. Exchanging the hard drive was not a problem but it turned out installing Linux on an EFI-based computer without optical drive was. After a couple of very frustrating evenings I gave up and sold the Mini on ebay (for stupid 200£). First I thought about getting either an Efika MX or some cheap nettop as a replacement, but for various reasons that seemed unsatisfying.

I started to look into availability of components and - surprise - there is a *lot* more diversity today (at much better prices) than a couple of years ago. After some searching I decided to not only build my own HTPC but also to finally get rid of all the pesky external hard drives (containing our media collection) that litter our living room.

This is the configuration I went for:

• mainboard: Gigabyte GA-D525TUD (Atom D525, 4 SATA connections, 1 IDE)
• memory: 2GB Hypertec DDR3
• PSU: 350W Akasa AK-P350AG8-SLUK (cheap but relatively quiet)
• case: LianLI PC-Q08R (stylish, silly LED fans, 6 HHD bays)

I ordered the whole lot for 260£ (including shipping) at scan (fast albeit somewhat verbose service BTW).

When I had put everything together the system worked essentially as it was supposed to - except for the noise level. Case fans, CPU fan, PSU and hard disks taken together were definitely a lot more audible (at least in the evening after the kids' bed time) than I would have liked for our living room. This was however easily solved - the case fans I just disconnected (even under full load the puny Atom didn't need them), the CPU fan is under strict control by, err, fancontrol (comes with lm-sensors), making it barely audible and the data disks power down after five minutes (hdparm -S is your friend). After all this it turns out that the PSU is actually really quiet...

Add in mlnet and mediatomb and now from every device (except from my AC100, grrr) in our house the server can be accessed to browse, consume and, erm, acquire media. And the box in our living room is quiet and pretty.