Quite a few things have happened since my last post. One of the most important, of course, is the completion of my little new Linux box. Here she is...
Silicon Power Slim 60 GB SATA3 SSD drive. It is only 2.5 inches wide, offers SATA3 6Gbps connectivity, and very energy efficient. I selected this SSD because it was inexpensive, fairly fast, and rated as quite energy efficient. Formatted this as ext2 and used it as my OS and swap drive. Spent $30.Toshiba 500 GB 7200 RPM hard drive. It is your basic 500 GB 7200 RPM SATA3 hard drive. It offers SATA 3 6Gpbs connectivity and a 32 MB cache. I selected this drive because it was inexpensive, had good reviews and was the right amount of storage for my needs. Spent 45$
ASRock C70M1 Motherboard with AMD Dual Core Ontario C-70 APU. This mini-ITX motherboard/CPU combo offers very low power consumption, no unneeded video capability (I only needed basic VGA), up to 16 GB RAM, 64 bit processor/data bus width, four SATA3 6Gbps connectors and a host of other things. No, this is NOT a gaming or server mobo/CPU. The C-70 APU is only dual core and runs at about 1GHz but this board is extremely quiet, energy efficient and seemed to fit my requirements. Total price of this board was $40 - not bad for motherboard and CPU.
I added a couple of Mushkin 2GB DDR3 RAM sticks for $22 and a basic APEX 250 watt power supply for 19$. I tied it all together in an old Dell computer case and installed Debian Jessy. The only little issue I had was the fact my little USB WiFi dongel wasn't supported natively. Really, it was a minor issue. After some research, the driver source was located on GitHub, it was easily compiled and installed.
So, for a total of about $156 I have a new little Linux box. ( had an old flat screen VGA monitor just wasting space so used that). Pretty happy so far.
More details and maybe a benchamark or two.
