Help me design a media server/backup facility

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22 Jul 2010
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Hi everyone,

A friend of mine recommended the OcUK forum as one of the best places to get advice on a new system build. While I'm a technical guy I have to confess to buying off the shelf boxes the last couple of times so my knowledge of hardware stuff is completely out of date so I'm looking for some advice and to hopefully shortcut an entire weekend spent on various hardware sites :)

So, what do I want it for?

It's going to run in a shared house of three people. It will be away in a utility room so doesn't matter if it's a bit noisy. We are all professionals, with decent backup requirements most notably myself as I'm self employed and I'm starting to outgrow the external hard drive option.

We've all got a load of media content that we'd like to make generally available around the house, which is fully networked via a combination of standard ethernet and powerline for those hard to reach spots.

I've just bought myself an iPad and don't really wish to do all the re-encoding on my desktop so giving the server enough grunt to do that in the background without taking forever would be good (although it's going to be sat there a load anyway so we don't need to go overboard on optimizing for encoding speed).

Finally, I'm Linux savvy so unless someone has some dire warning (no "Lunix sux" doesn't count) about media encoding or otherwise I'll be running it as a headless server on Debian/Ubuntu or something.

So how far have I got?

CPU-wise I'm thinking some moderate Core 2 Quad will do me but I have no idea whether this is right or not.

4GB of DDR3 for memory. Can't see my needing more and less seems like I'd be asking for trouble for a box like this.

3 x 2TB in RAID 5 for disk space. It's going to be backing up a lot of important stuff for all of us so some redundancy is important.

Motherboard wise I'd like it to support RAID 5 (for the hard disks) and wake on LAN (so we can tell it to take a nap and save power when not in use) as well as the usual stuff.

I don't think I need a graphics card. I've read that some encoders will work faster with one but it seems like unnecessary cost, especially given it'll be sat there idling a lot.

The utility room it'll be in isn't a tight cupboard but doesn't get too much air so I'll probably get a decent heat sink and some extra fans just to be sure.

Specific questions?

Firstly, am I wrong about anything above? I've done a fair bit of reading before coming to you guys but it's by no means complete and any/all of the above could be complete rubbish. Please enlighten me if I am.

Is a Core 2 Quad sufficient CPU for doing video encoding and still being able to act as a file server for other stuff etc?

Am I going to find a motherboard that does DDR3, wake-on-lan and RAID5 onboard? I've looked but can't find one. Should I just get some compromise and get an added RAID controller or something?

Any other thoughts are greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Andy

PS: Sorry for the rather long post. If you got through it all, I thank you :)
 
As u plan to use Linux have u thought about mythtv ?
You can run that as a server client system. The backend server acts as a proper media Center which can stream to any media players as well as connecting front ends to them as well to access the content

I run mine on a q6660. And it handles perfectly fine and does a lot of encoding
I also use it for tv with an array of tv tuners in the backend. Allowing me to scedule and record multiple programs at a time and watch tv from any of the front ends

If you series about backup then a seperate server that is just used as a backup would be a good idea then just have it run backups of the server perodically. Plenty of backup solutions for Linux
 
As u plan to use Linux have u thought about mythtv ?
You can run that as a server client system. The backend server acts as a proper media Center which can stream to any media players as well as connecting front ends to them as well to access the content

I run mine on a q6660. And it handles perfectly fine and does a lot of encoding
I also use it for tv with an array of tv tuners in the backend. Allowing me to scedule and record multiple programs at a time and watch tv from any of the front ends

If you series about backup then a seperate server that is just used as a backup would be a good idea then just have it run backups of the server perodically. Plenty of backup solutions for Linux

Haven't given much thought to the software I'll be using yet. I know a lot about Linux but very little about the media options available. I'll start doing this once I've got the hardware sorted and I'll put MythTV to the top of the list to investigate.

I agree that backing up the server periodically would be a good idea but for now I'm happy with the half way house that the server will be the backup of my main PC. Anything that only exists on the server would be annoying to lose but not terrible so I'm prepared to live with the RAID5 and if I suffer multiple failures then eh, I lose my media.

Cheers,

Andy
 
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