Low voltage/watt CPU suggestion?

[NDong]

Hi,

I am trying to build a small home server to use as an NAS, I want to put it on 24x7 so I do want the CPU to be as low power consuming as possible while having some power to get things done.

I had some research, the Celeron J1900 looks good, cause it is quad core, can go up to 2.4GHz(although kind of inflated), TDP is only 10W(I can build a fanless machine with this CPU).

However, since I want to have 4 SATA3 interfaces(to install 4 SATA3 HDD), there is probably only one choice: the supermicro X10SBA. Unfortunately if I want to buy one, the reseller in my region has to do a special order, making it very expansive and I need to wait for 3 weeks. Also I saw some people complaining about some issues that J1900 had with Linux systems. So I gave this one up.

Now I have ASUS H87I-PLUS in my sight, it has 6 SATA3 interfaces, quite expandable. Then I have to put a CPU on it. Unfortunately the desktop Celeron CPUs all have TDP~53W, which is much higher. I actually wanted to have a Celeron G1840T(TDP 35W), but seems "T" series is not sold to individual customers? I could not find them on any amazon/ebay.

The old Atom CPU is not even found in "CPU onboard" category...although they seem to have some new models coming out...

Could anyone suggest a solution to me?

Any help would be very much appreciated!

[adef2]

Why do you need four SATA 3 ports? Are you aware that even the highest speed enterprise hard drives (HDDs) max out at ~200 MB/sec throughput, still way below the SATA 2 limit of 270 MB/sec?

The fact is you only need SATA 3 for an SSD, because a good SSD will be bottlenecked by an old SATA 2 port.

As you're proposing to run a NAS I'm assuming you're looking to run 4x HDDs, or perhaps 1x SSD (for the OS) plus 3x HDD. In that case I would recommend looking at the ASRock Q1900-ITX or ASRock Q1900DC-ITX (the difference is the "DC" has a built-in fanless PSU and runs off a laptop power brick) as they have 2x SATA2 and 2x SATA3. There are other options as well, but I hear bad things about the Gigabyte offering - they can only boot to Windows 8 until you update the BIOS, which requires installing Win8 in the first place... which is a pain. They also have some issues with Linux based NAS OS like FreeBSD I hear, something about kernel panic... I'm a Windows user so I'm just regurgitating what I've heard

[NDong]

Yes I am aware of the issue that mechanical HDDs are not fast enough to max out SATA2 ports. It was kind of OCD...I feel uncomfortable if I connect an SATA3 HDD to an SATA2 port. I guess I would have to get rid of this...

Maybe I will go for a J2900 mobo. I also have an eye on new AMD AM1 products, they are quite competitive, but TDP 25W...not so sure.

And this is quite important: if that mobo or CPU has poor support to linux system, that would be an automatic pass.