low-power motherboard for windows home server

Firstly - I've used search, I've run through all the topics tagged with these ones, but couldn't find anything satisfying.

I'm trying to build a home server machine, which should be a low-power always-on backup and file sharing station. On the software side, I've decided on Windows Home Server and at the moment am trying to find proper hardware at the lowest price possible.

The biggest problem is the motherboard. It should be compatible with Intel Atom processors (as they appear to be the most efficient and low-power ones), should be able to run at least two (four would be great) sata HDDs, support RAID and have at least four USB ports.

Integrated Video and LAN would be great (and it's really hard to find MoBos without them too).

The only motherboard with all of these specs I could find was the Supermicro X7SLA-L-O, but it has the Atom 230 integrated, which is slow on HD Video. And it starts from around $120.

On the other hand, there are many MoBos with integrated Atom 330 and 2 sata ports, but with no RAID. And their starting from $80, like Intel D945GCLF2 (can't post more than one hyperlink, please google).

Maybe I should go with the latter one and add a PCI SATA Controller Card (again - please google)? It would be cheaper and more feature complete.

What would you suggest?

P.S. Could any kind of failure of the Sata Controller Card damage drives (and the data on them) connected to it?

On the RAID requirement, Windows Home Server (WHS) uses its own Drive Extender (DE) technology instead of RAID. This treats installed drives as one large 'storage pool' rather than as separate hard drives and as long as you have two or more physical hard drives installed it will duplicate data across the drives to safeguard it against disk problems.

This is already giving you RAID's redundancy/backup and drive pooling capabilities natively as part of the OS, so depending what you want it for, you may not actually need a hardware RAID controller at all. In fact, depending on what RAID configuration you go for and how much you understand about how RAID really works, it might actually be a very bad idea to use RAID on a WHS.

One of Microsoft's coders has a good comparison of RAID vs DE here Windows Home Server's Drive Extender vs RAID, and the official WHS Team Blog explains exactly why they didn't use RAID here Why RAID is not a consumer technology.

Essentially RAID is best used in two different scenarios, either you want a blazingly fast hard disk system, but don't really care if the disks die and you lose the data; or you're using RAID in a proper server where there's a dedicated team of people who'll be running full regular backups of the data very regularly and will have monitoring tools to alert them when any of the drives start dying and need replacing. It's going to be quite rare that either of these are true for a home server where you're probably storing valuable data and won't be running 24 hour monitoring and alerts with hardware suppliers sending you replacements under SLAs measured in hours.

If you're using it as a windows home server then the HD Video performance and indeed any video performance is irrelevant since WHS is designed to run headless without a display and managed through a client on a remote PC. If you're planning on playing video directly from the machine you need to choose a different OS.

If you're just planning on playing Video from other PC's then it's going to be your network performance that's important.

This site http://www.mini-itx.com/store/ has a range of mini-itx boards featuring both intel and via alternatives, it's uk based but it will at least give you an idea of what's out there.

Alright, after many thinking, I decided using RAID 1 is not a clever idea, as shared folders can be duplicated (if you install more than two HDDs) and Backing up computer backups is really silly.

So I went with Intel D945GCLF2 and I'm more than satisfied. It's cheap, quiet, cool and low-power and absolutely enough for WHS. Consider it, if you're going to build a WHS machine.

Thanks for your answers.