chicken Posted April 13, 2015 Share #1 Posted April 13, 2015 Hey guys, I just stumbled across this forum. Been a Synology user for a few years now and love it for its simplicity. I work in IT and the last thing I want to do is take care of my media server at home after a long day at work. Anyways we use Video Station a ton for our two young kids to steam movies to either their Apple TV or our old iPad2s. We do a fair amount of long 6-8 hour car trips and download a few movies the iOS DS Video app for the kids to watch in the car. I was thinking of picking up a EDS14 and rsyncing our movie collection to it so the kids could just stream right from the server in the car so they had a wider selection of movies and we did not burn up the limited space on the two old ipads. The downside is the EDS14 is $$$ compared to a Pi or a QNap QGenie but since our kids are young (2 & 4) I wanted to keep it as easy as possible for them so they do not need to learn another app. Thats where I am hoping XPEnology could be my answer. Does anyone have any recommendations on a low end hardware platform that is very low power that I can keep up and running all the time in the car. The car is driven every day so even something in the 10 total watt range will not kill the car. I appreciate any pointers and will make sure I document my build here. Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MaZeeT Posted April 16, 2015 Share #2 Posted April 16, 2015 Personal I am a big fan of the "Asrock Q1900-ITX/Q1900DC-ITX" motherboard.. It should be using 10watts if I remember correctly... got 4 sata ports so you could add the drives you need... It got a mini-PCIe slot for a wifi-card, so you can boardcast a network in the car.. and it comes in 2 models... Normal power supply or a DC-power-supply (which could be easy to power in a car).. http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Q1900-ITX/ http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Q1900DC-ITX/ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chicken Posted April 17, 2015 Author Share #3 Posted April 17, 2015 Mazeet thanks for the info. I saw that board after I posted. Looks pretty good. I also noticed the new intel Braswell CPUs are close to shipping. Msi just announced their boards. Since I only need a single sata port it looks like the msi board might be a good fit and it's only 6 watts. Check out http://www.anandtech.com/show/9147/bras ... therboards. Thinking the n3050i will be more than enough as I won't be doing any trancoding on the box. Hopefully asrock will announce something soon also. As for power input I want a board that has atx power input as I found an awesome power supply. Check out http://www.mini-box.com/M3-ATX-DC-DC-AT ... tegory=981. It is meant for car setups and can power on and off the computer including delays when the car is started and stopped. Since it uses the power switch jumper on the motherboard I wonder how DSM would work with that. Any ideas if that would work well on shutting down DSM safely and cleanly? Thanks! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
chicken Posted May 26, 2015 Author Share #4 Posted May 26, 2015 Ok we are in business... Using a Minibox M350 Universal Mini-ITX enclosure with one of their M3-ATX DC-DC Power supplies and an Asrock Q1900-ITX along with a samsung 2TB sata drive. Everything booted right up and pretty much worked out of the box As you can see the system is drawing about 8.5 watts at idle. This little M3-ATX power supply rocks. You can go in via serial and setup how long it waits to book up once the car starts, how long to stay online after the car is turned off and even had low battery voltage protection. I followed the apci thread on these forums and was able to get DSM to shut down when you press the power button. Thats how this power supply shuts down the computer. It has a connection to the power switch on the motherboard and when it hits the timers you set it shuts down. Only thing left to do now is wait for amazon to deliver a USB wireless network adapter for me so I can get it to auto sync over all the movies from my 1513+ in the garage and then setup the little HooToo Nano router off the ethernet port so the kids have wifi in the car to stream all of their 200+ movies in DS video Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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