For many years I've been running a 2nd-hand "desktop" machine as a home server, which runs print, file & email services and a few others. It's an least 10 Y/O Pentium (5?) with 3GB RAM and is usually not taxed by these services.
I have asked before, but I've never actually got round to doing anything about it, but I've got executive approval from the S/O BUT....
I'm in two minds. Do I go for
A) a traditional box, plenty of room, RAIDed disk but comparatively high power consumption
e.g.
https://www.entroware.com/store/desktops/nyx
or
https://secure.zeta.systems/store/desktops/D540/
which seem to have PSUs rated about 650W
or
B) a small NUC style box, low power consumption thingy like
https://www.entroware.com/store/desktops/aura
or
Something like the mini-itx jobbies available here
https://www.logicsupply.com/uk-en/products/commercial-computers/mc500-series...
These seem to consume about 65W.
I will be running some flavour of Ubuntu on it. I'd probably prefer it was 64Bit. I want it to be a "standard architecture" processor so that there will be a full-range of apps available to install from the ubuntu repositories.
I would like to have a low-power-consumption as it's an always on device, and it doesn't seem to need much processing power. I'd also like to have raid (mirroring), but most low power-consumption machines don't seem to have space for raid.
Does anyone have any comments or recommendations, especially of any companies they have dealt with, or products they have purchased that work well?
Thanks in advance.
Steve