Spec my server...

AliP

AliP

AliP

Associate
Joined
24 Feb 2008
Posts
68
Hi,

I've decided to finally organise my computing setup at home and want to take the Christmas break to do it. As part of this, I'm keen to move all music (mp3s/flac), films and photos into a central store, which can then be accessed from the various devices in the house (MBP, PS3 etc). I was just going to go for a simple NAS, but after some guidance believe a Windows Home Server is the better route to go down. Mainly because I can run software on the top to do fancy things like realtime transcoding etc if required. Plus (as it stands), this gives you more flexibility to expand in the future.

So I'm looking to build a home server. I'm after a reasonable amount of horsepower. Enough to handle HD video streaming etc. Obviously power usage and noise is an issue - I'd like it to be as cheap to run, and as quiet as possible. I'd also like the box to not take up too much space, but that said I'm keen to keep space to expand in the future, and keen that the hard-drives have good airflow.

Here is the spec I have at the moment:

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1545211/basket.png

My budget is around £500.

Any help or suggestions gratefully appreciated.

Cheers,
 
I'm thinking of getting a file/media server at some point next year and will probably go for Bobcat + Windows Home Server v2, neither of which are out yet, so I can't help too much planning for one right now.

However, if I had to make one now I would probably go for an Atom-based PC just because they're very energy efficient and quiet/silent (which is good since a server is on 24/7 usually) and you don't need much CPU power for doing something like this. It'd have to have a lot of SATA ports though, or a PCI-E expansion slot for more.

What kind of HD video streaming do you mean by the way? If it's just playing your HD videos on another PC, an HTPC, a PS3 or whatever then you don't need a powerful CPU because the device itself will decode and play back the video. The server would just be reading & sending data from its HDD over your network. If you want the server to do live transcoding whilst streaming then an Athlon II or i3 would probably be a better choice.

EDIT: According to this article, the i3 530 is actually similar to the Atom in idle power consumption but obviously packs a lot more punch when under load, so it seems like a very nice choice for this environment.
 
Last edited:
Hi DragonQ,

Thanks for the reply. Yeah I guess I wasn't clear. I think I'd like the ability to be able to transcode on the fly.
In reality, I'm not so sure. I would probably end up doing this very rarely. It's hard to know the trade-off. I think more important is probably noise and power-consumption.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom