Low Power Samba Server

[paradisiac]

ok, so I got my media player all sorted with XBMC, but the problem is at the moment I am using a standard desktop as my file server. this is not cost effective to be on 24/7 so really just want something that's not overly expensive to allow me to share 3-4 hard drives via samba (or nfs) with my media player that is really low powered. did think about a raspberry pi, but read they are not the best performance wise.

 

[ecksmen]

This is a pet peeve of mine, Samba is not a protocol its an application for unix like operating systems to share files via Sever Message Block / Common Internet File protocol.

But in answer to your question, FreeNAS.

 

[memyselfandi]

But that doesn't answer the question as FreeNAS is an OS, which may very well be perfectly suitable to run on whatever the OP does get, but doesn't answer the question of what cheap and low powered hardware to use as a server.

OP, are your media files in a format that your media player handles natively ... i.e. that the server end will not need to transcode? If they are then you can get away with something which is very low powered, as it just needs to serve the files onto the network, but if transcoding is needed then you may find you do need some CPU grunt in order for that to be done.

 

[Uhtred]

N40L or N54L with Freenas installed is what I use. Also has plugins for plex/sickbeard/torrent client

 

[Frozennova]

Just about any low powered CPU with plenty of RAM and FreeNAS is the perfect solution, especially with Sickbeard/SabNZB/Couchpotato/MySQL running in a plugin jail

Mine is currently a Sempron x2 190 with 8GB of ram, although FreeNAS is a VM running along side another windows 7 VM in ESXI.

I paid around £150 for board,cpu ram and power supply reusing an old case and cooler I had laying around.

I should have thought a little more about wanting to run ESXI though as the board I bought only has 2 ram slots and doesn't support IOMMU so I can't passthrough my Dell SAS 6/ir yet.

 

[paradisiac]

But that doesn't answer the question as FreeNAS is an OS, which may very well be perfectly suitable to run on whatever the OP does get, but doesn't answer the question of what cheap and low powered hardware to use as a server.

OP, are your media files in a format that your media player handles natively ... i.e. that the server end will not need to transcode? If they are then you can get away with something which is very low powered, as it just needs to serve the files onto the network, but if transcoding is needed then you may find you do need some CPU grunt in order for that to be done.

nope no transcoding needed. just want it to host video/audio files that my Pi plays back using RaspMC.

Just about any low powered CPU with plenty of RAM and FreeNAS is the perfect solution, especially with Sickbeard/SabNZB/Couchpotato/MySQL running in a plugin jail

Mine is currently a Sempron x2 190 with 8GB of ram, although FreeNAS is a VM running along side another windows 7 VM in ESXI.

I paid around £150 for board,cpu ram and power supply reusing an old case and cooler I had laying around.

I should have thought a little more about wanting to run ESXI though as the board I bought only has 2 ram slots and doesn't support IOMMU so I can't passthrough my Dell SAS 6/ir yet.

so would just installing FreeNAS as the OS on my pc mean it will cost less to run, as I assume it will be doing less work?

Current Server is :
AMD A4-3300 APU 2.5GHz Dual Core
8GB DDR3 (2x4GB)
Gigabyte GA-A55M-S2V
3x HDD
480w PSU
Windows 7 With Filesharing, XBMC with MYSQL library share