Stealth Computers: NY Times on Mini ITX Modding

securitas writes "What's smaller than a breadbox? Or a toaster? Or a teddy bear? The New York Times has just discovered mini-ITX based computers (Google /CNET mirror, minus the pictures). It's a nice overview of the mini-ITX scene and suggests that small form computers are a hot growth area while the traditional PC business languishes."

Comments

Traditional PC languishes

[Sir Haxa1ot]

...traditional PC languishes

What the heck? Pc business is growing, not too fast, but there are more and more PCs sold each year. Whatever product you come up with for post-PC era, PC kills it from the price standpoint. Network computer, dedicated e-mail devices, Internet-enabled frames, image viewers you hook up to a PC - all crushed by the PC.

Re:Great

[BrynM]

You're neglecting the Wow Factor. Wow Factor is street cred among most geeks. As an avid case modder (I re-use old parts though, I usually don't buy new), half the fun is having someone say "that's a computer?". (Please be gentle to my very low bandwidth - personal DSL - server) You can see two basic examples of my own work making odd firewalls here. They're nothing special, but I get the "that's a computer" stuff all the time about these two and they aren't even the good ones, they just happen to be the two I made for my own use.

Re:These are fun...

[mgarriss]

the board
power supply
ram

Commell has Pentium 4 in Mini-ITX, but no cases

[Anonymous Coward]

I was recently trying to buy Commell Pentium 4 mini-ITX boards with industrial cases. There aren't any yet. (There are ads, but you can't get delivery.) That board takes more power than the power supplies for most mini-ITX cases deliver.

Ended up using a Nova 8890, which fits in a 5.25" drive bay footprint. There's a nice industrial brick type case for this. No removable storage, though; this is industrial, not entertainment. Industrial temp range, watchdog timer, etc.

Re:Small is good?

[Brandybuck]

Smaller == less standard - increased use of nonstandard integrated components

Hardware manufacturers have traditionally supported Windows only. If you're running Linux or *BSD you've run into this problem at least once. Free software operating systems are in a continous "catch-up" mode to hardware. Last month's distro isn't going to have drivers for this week's new piece of hardware.

The smaller you make the systems, the worse this becomes. My current system has integrated audio and ethernet, neither of which works with Linux or FreeBSD. Fortunately this was a full sized ATX sytem. If it has been a mini ITX system with room for only one PCI expansion slot, I would have been up the proverbial creek.

I'm thinking about building a tiny system to use as a small quiet home server. Doing my compatibility research, I've found that the smaller the mobo the harder it is for the non-Windows user to use.

Recommended disk: Seagate Barracuda V

[Kjella]

120GB disk

Just any 120GB disk can be quite noisy.. here's a couple alternatives from storagereview.com's database:

Seagate Barracuda ATA V (120 GB ATA-100) - 37.8 Db
IBM Deskstar 120GXP (120 GB ATA-100) - 45.8 Db
Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB (120 GB ATA-100) - 47.3 Db

Decibel is a logarithmic scale unless you know, so this is a *lot*. Since the disk will be the noisyest part of the system, I'd definately go for a Seagate

Re:What I would like to see.

[Anonymous Coward]

gentoo maybe?

Component Failure

[Ken Treis]

I've owned about 7 mini-ITX boxes, and 3 of them have had motherboard flaws when I unpacked them (2 had bad network ports, and one had no USB). Another one worked for a month or so before the network port went bad. Still another only boots about 2 out of every three times I push the power button on. I end up having to use the one PCI slot for an extra network card just to get the network to work. Has anyone else experienced issues like this?

I am not one to give up easily on something like this. The form factor and lower power consumption of these boards is very cool. But I've given up on Via's EPIA and EPIA-M.

Instead of the EPIA platform, I'm now deploying servers based on the Total Impact BriQ. And I'm much happier. I didn't need Firewire, USB (except for keyboard, and the BriQ has a serial port instead), or fancy graphics (BriQ has none, unless you count the VFD, heh). But they make slick servers.

And they run Debian/PPC nicely, but you have to use a network install to get it software on there.