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My Home Server has served me well however the aging 1.2GHz VIA board that was in it has long since peaked.  Time for an upgrade…

I decided to go for the POV MB330-1 which has 4xSATA on board along with a eSATA and a dual core 1.6GHz Atom processor.  I also decided to add an internal 2.5” drive to act as the system disc to make hot swapping drives in my Chenbro case far easier.  I’m not going to bother documenting the build in too much detail, for the most part I simply put all the bit in a case so it shouldn’t be too taxing if you RTFM.  I installed the system using a USB key, details can be found on We Got Served.

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Picture on the left shows the laptop hard disk hidden away in the lesser known internal slot in the Chenbro case, on the right we see the PCI SATA card to add the extra port for the system disc.  All four bays are on the mainboards SATA ports, I’ve no idea if this is best practice but it seemed to make sense that they be adjacent on the system to reduce a potential bottleneck at PCI.  It may also simply be my OCD…

One thing that had me baffled (and still does) is the extra SATA port situated near the eSATA port.  I tried plugging a disk into it and nothing happened, whatever it is I’m sorry to say it is not a SATA port.  Maybe it will be enable in a future bios update but for now its purpose remains unclear.

One piece of advice I cannot stress enough it to get the latest drivers from Realtek for the LAN.  I am not certain of the exact chipset used but these drivers worked for me.  Network throughput went through the roof after this and the connection became a lot more stable too.

Hope this helps someone, any questions feel free to ask in the comments.

Keegan

Ps.  No, I don’t work for Mini-ITX.com or get commission (a shame!) but I’ve been using them for years and they’ve been helpful with any questions I’ve had.

UPDATE:  If you randomly get bluescreens or messages saying "You system has recovered from a serious error" try uninstalling IPv6.  My server was crashing a few times a day and after a kind soul at work reviewed the memory dumps it was IPv6 making the network driver crap out.