Torrent/Home Server

DireEmblem · 10 Jul 2010 at 22:56

Hi,

Am thinking of building something along the lines of the below:-

Asus Motherboard with inbuilt 90w PSU ~£100
1GB DDR3 ~15
1.5TB HDD ~£55

And i think thats all I would need for the now. I have a spare 250GB HDD I might use as a boot drive, although I am tempted to get a cheap flash drive to boot.

I bought a copy of windows 7 a month or so ago with the thought of using for this, but have decided that this box will either use my copy of XP, or more likely linux

D).

So all in all, with the thought of selling my Win7 CD(unopened), my thoughts is that this should only cost me around the hundred mark.

I dont need a case, as I have a spare soprano case, and this will sit in a cupboard anyhow, so it doesnt really matter what it goes in.

I've chosen an Ion board, incase of future HTPC usage, although at the moment this will just be used for downloading torrents overnight for my favourite tv programs (V, chuck, stargate etc), and streaming to my ps3.

Can anyone think of anything I may have overlooked? I know the 1GB ddr3 might seem a bit weedy, but this box wont be pushed too hard, and i've read from a quick scout that the onboard psu can cope with the power draw of 4 sata hdd's, which I will slowly add.

Suggestions for improvements/change to build are welcome, and i'm going to give this a week to ensure that I am happy with the components before ordering.

Destination · 10 Jul 2010 at 23:09

Will you get 1Gb of ddr3 for £15?
What about peripherals, or will you network the box and run it as a nas?

DireEmblem · 10 Jul 2010 at 23:22

Sorry should have said, the box will be connected via Cat, so its wired to the router.

I'm currently researching which version of linux to install, currently thinking of Fedora.

I also want to find a torrent client, in which on my laptop/PC when I select a torrent, it automatically gets the box to take over downloading it.

Destination · 11 Jul 2010 at 08:24

Best to post on the linux forums for the folks who know their stuff to enlighten you.

SuBo · 11 Jul 2010 at 10:28

Fedora, or Ubuntu.

Install Transmission-daemon, and fuppes.

Transmission has a webGUI, for adding/managing torrents. (or a windows style client, which uses the web interface itself http://code.google.com/p/transmisson-remote-gui/).

Fuppes is a transcoder so that your PS3 can read files.

Add Samba into the mix, so that you can browse the linux box from windows, by mapping a drive, and you really are sorted.

Sorted.

If you can live without a GUI for linux, you can easily run this from a 1Gb IDE Flash or SD Card or similar.

MTA99 · 21 Jul 2010 at 00:35

Have a look at unRAID, just got my box up and running with parity. Great concept and really good (growing) community.

Cycrow · 24 Jul 2010 at 18:10

another option for software would be TorrentFlux, which is a web specific torrent client.

so everything can be handled remotly by the client

JonJ678 · 29 Jul 2010 at 01:35

Fedora has a reputation for being the testing/playing ground for red hat developers. It's not especially friendly towards beginners, and not going to be as stable as some of the alternatives. Exciting learning curve though.

Ubuntu is very beginner friendly. Playing with ubuntu then installing debian stable on it would be my recommendation for a nas. I had something like 180 days of uninterrupted uptime before taking my one apart, debian stable does what it says on the tin.

The hardware you've chosen is thoroughly overspecified for torrenting, but a sensible spec if multiple hard drives and raid 5 is in your future. If it's not, the atom is likely to be a lot faster than you need until you start playing back HD stuff (not sure how competently it's offloaded to the ion with linux).

90W and four 3.5" hard drives is borderline if they all spin up at once, you might want to check that one carefully. I couldn't find any specifications for the built in psu when I was looking at doing much the same thing.

Your idea is a solid one though, it'll work well.