Building my own NAS for DLNA (II): specs

On part I I explained what I'm trying to accomplish, and told you about a recent Atom netbook and an old Pentium M notebook. I also had at hand a Pentium 4 based notebook, but soon enough I realized that neither noise nor power consumption would be good, so I left it aside.

The netbook is an Acer Aspire One model AO751h. Based on a Atom Z520 1.33 Ghz processor, it has a good 11.6-inch WXGA 16:9 ratio Acer CrystalBrite High Definition LED back-lit TFT LCD (1364 x 768 resolution). The rest of the specs are the usual for this kind of netbooks.

The old notebook is an Acer Travelmate 382TCi and it dates back to the end of 2004/beginning of 2005, just upgraded to 1GB of memory. At the time, it was a business class ultra-portable notebook with a weight of just 1,6 kilos.


As you can see, the specs are very similar. The vertical screen resolution is the same (768), while the horizontal is better in the Aspire One thanks to its screen format. However, the Travelmate has a traditional 4:3 screen which some users find very useful.

Storage is won hands down by the netbook, but I don't think it is very important, as an external disk will be installed. Having bluetooth or webcam is a feature any user should value: BT lets you connect some keyboard/mouse combos, and the webcam will be useful if you want to do some videoconferencing.

The Aspire One has 3 USB 2.0 ports, while the Travelmate has only 2. But the later has a mini firewire connector, so if you are planning to use this kind of external storage it is great.


The Atom shows two logical cores thanks to hyper threading, and includes two newer instructions sets. The ancient Pentium M wins in raw clock speed and quadruples L2 cache size.

How do they perform? It looks to me like a neck and neck race. Let's find out...


Building my own NAS for DLNA (I)
Building my own NAS for DLNA (II): specs
Building my own NAS for DLNA (III): performance
Building my own NAS for DLNA (IV): CPU usage and power consumption
Building my own NAS for DLNA (V): Conclusions

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