I have built a couple of boxes, and want to build a bare bones box for the office. I need to run Dockers (owncloud, dropbox, crashplan) and a VM to run pfsense (although, I have a box running pfsense and could leave that out).

 

I am trying to figure out the least expensive set-up to allow for this build, and never notice that I went cheap ;-)

 

I will not be transcoding or doing anything terribly taxing on the processor, but I need to passthrough the NIC for pfsense (or do I?).  I am only going to have three or four drives in the array (no media files lowers the needs), so I don't need a vast number of SATA ports on the board either.

 

Side issue: since this box will be working mostly as archival storage, I'd like a backup solution. Since the whole backup will be <2TB, I was thinking about using two shares, limit each to separate physical drives, and using cron and rsync to have two copies in the array at all times. Other more elegant solutions welcome.

 

Any and all suggestions welcome.

How about (Atom) Avoton based servers?

 

http://www.amazon.com/Supermicro-Mini-A1SRI-2558F-O-Motherboard-Combo/dp/B00HS4NLHA

 

That price already includes the CPU, the motherboard has IPMI kvm, supports ECC ram up to 64GB. If you need more oomph, there's an 8-core version for just $50 more.

 

If you need lots of  SATA port, ASRock's version comes with 12 sata onboard ports.

 

If you need NICs, ASUS' version has 4 or 5 NICs.

 

Most of these are fanless too.