Tl;DR Always on, lowest power, silent server, have raid card, back planes, drives, serve up to 5 users. What sort of spec is needed?
After upgrading my HTPC to a small case and what not, and with hard drives capacity increasing, and SSD prices dropping, I am considering moving some/most of the mechanical drives out of my main rig to reduce "the hum", weight, and free up space.
Currently it is running
3x 2TB RAID 5 for game installs
5x 2TB RAID 5 for Media, installers, images, general stuff
3x 2TB RAID 0 for recording via dxtory/xsplit
I am running out of space (~250gb free) on my storage set of drives, but don't want to upgrade them yet. I am currently saving up to upgrade my main rig to the new shiny tech, around the end of the year, early next year, I was considering at this time to switch the recording and game installs over to SSD's, thus freeing up space, which would mean I could use pump/res combos in some of my 5.25" bays, and give myself more radiator space in the bottom of my case, and modding it to hold a larger one in the top.
So, I could therefore stick the raid card into a server, and either use my old kandalf case, or any new (cheapish, lots of drive bays) case. It would only ever be used for storing backups, images, media, software installers etc. This would be serving no more than five users at a time, normally only one.
I have all the drives since I could replace my recording drives with a couple of large SSD's, and swap out the games drive for a larger single drive/few ssd's.
I also have two 5 in 3 backplanes, an 8 port raid card, a MSI skt 775 mobo, 4gb ddr3, q6600, GTX 470, and an ocz 700w psu.
I would be looking to create an always on, very low power, silent server.
Any idea on what sort of spec I should be looking at? i3, itx and a few gb of ram good enough? in whatever case can hold all the drives? Have a couple of super silent fans on the drives and the rest passive?
Another option would be to stick some large (6gb+) drives in a caddy and plug them into my asus diamond max n56u routers usb ports and share them that way? I am assuming USB 2.0 is fine for streaming HD content? This would probably not cost much since I could sell all the other drives.
After upgrading my HTPC to a small case and what not, and with hard drives capacity increasing, and SSD prices dropping, I am considering moving some/most of the mechanical drives out of my main rig to reduce "the hum", weight, and free up space.
Currently it is running
3x 2TB RAID 5 for game installs
5x 2TB RAID 5 for Media, installers, images, general stuff
3x 2TB RAID 0 for recording via dxtory/xsplit
I am running out of space (~250gb free) on my storage set of drives, but don't want to upgrade them yet. I am currently saving up to upgrade my main rig to the new shiny tech, around the end of the year, early next year, I was considering at this time to switch the recording and game installs over to SSD's, thus freeing up space, which would mean I could use pump/res combos in some of my 5.25" bays, and give myself more radiator space in the bottom of my case, and modding it to hold a larger one in the top.
So, I could therefore stick the raid card into a server, and either use my old kandalf case, or any new (cheapish, lots of drive bays) case. It would only ever be used for storing backups, images, media, software installers etc. This would be serving no more than five users at a time, normally only one.
I have all the drives since I could replace my recording drives with a couple of large SSD's, and swap out the games drive for a larger single drive/few ssd's.
I also have two 5 in 3 backplanes, an 8 port raid card, a MSI skt 775 mobo, 4gb ddr3, q6600, GTX 470, and an ocz 700w psu.
I would be looking to create an always on, very low power, silent server.
Any idea on what sort of spec I should be looking at? i3, itx and a few gb of ram good enough? in whatever case can hold all the drives? Have a couple of super silent fans on the drives and the rest passive?
Another option would be to stick some large (6gb+) drives in a caddy and plug them into my asus diamond max n56u routers usb ports and share them that way? I am assuming USB 2.0 is fine for streaming HD content? This would probably not cost much since I could sell all the other drives.