Building a server, new or old parts?

[demonix]

With everything else I've planned, I've decided to build a server that would mainly be for video storage and streaming to other devices (it will also be for data storage as one of many backups).

The question about using either new or old parts is that I have an asrock 775i65G R2.0 (just to be clear since there are two variants of that board) that I purchased ages ago for my desktop upgrade and hadn't used (it's still in it's bag in the box with everything else), but I'm not sure if I should use it for this project for the following reasons.

While I can get a compatible CPU for next to nothing, the RAM is going to be at least twice as much for 1GB then I would pay for 2GB or 4GB of low end DDR3 RAM plus I would be limited in what I can get in regards to hard drives along with size and quantity since I can't seem to find anywhere that sells IDE cables which would allow the use of the second IDE connector (and I would most likely be on the eternal lookout for compatible SATA hard drives since I doubt that current drives would be compatible with the older SATA ports on the board) and there's the issue of if the board itself still works.

On the other hand, I could build a system with an AMD socket FS1b (AM1 chipset) motherboard, processor, RAM, SSD for the OS (it wouldn't need to be that big since I'll be using linux for this), a starter HDD for storage and anything else I haven't mentioned here (like the case and power supply which I'm guessing wouldn't need to be that powerful) for around £250 and then add a SATA controller card to connect further hard drives in the future (this is just an example, and not a final spec).

I haven't decided on what variant of linux I'll be using for this, but I have a few images downloaded to experiment (although that is a problem at the moment since the only way I'm experimenting is through a virtual machine and I'm having a few issues with it) to nail down what I'll be using.

So, having read all this, should I try using the old board or should I just use new components so I can guarantee compatibility.

 

[demonix]

Would it not make sense to go with an atom (or AMD flavour) based integrated motherboard (Supermicro / Asrock Rack etc.) and build around that for future expansion with an LSI/IBM controller card (M1015 being a popular good call)? If of course by "streaming" you mean transcoding then you might need something with alittle more oomph for multiple transcodes; otherwise just serving files up would be fine and allow you to extend beyond the limits of a microserver in terms of expanding in the future.

Of course plug and play HP Microserver, Synology's and Qnaps will do what you want as well (albeit with their limitations).

That was pretty much an example and my investigations found that integrated motherboards are around the same price or even more then my initial spec, plus I did some investigations before posting here and for streaming from the server to another device (which one of the things it will be doing) requires a 1.6Ghz processor minimum and a few of the boards I found contained processors that didn't have the grunt or were borderline for what I needed.

Something that was fun last night when I read this (not logged in of course) was actually trying to find somewhere that actually sold the HP microserver (even HP themselves didn't sell them in their store unless I was looking in the wrong place) and I finally managed to find somewhere that stocked the celeron 2.3Ghz model with 4GB of RAM but no hard drives installed (or an optical drive which is likely to be required since most of the media I need to put on it is currently on DVD) for under £180 and adding the hard drive and optical drive to it only bumps the price to just over the cost of that build I quoted in the first post meaning I would have a server that is slightly more powerful then what I specified in separate parts (however if it is still that price when I get around to actually buying it is another matter).

Something I need to nail down is what variant of linux I'll be installing (I currently have Ubuntu server and a few variants of linux mint downloaded even though another variant was suggested, but I decided not to download it since it seems to be more bloated and requires 3 discs for the DVD image install variant) since it needs to be able to run plex for the streaming part.