File server

ntlbell

I'm looking to build a new central file server which will be accessed by HTPC's to stream music and movies.

There will be one or two internet radio's streaming mp3's from the server also.

I'll have 3 2TB SATA disks for storage and would like room to add more disks at a later stage.

It won't be used for gaming or any encoding/decoding purley as a file server

I would like to spend as little as possible but the box must be able to server at least two htpc's streaming movies and multiple radio's streaming mp3's at the same time

any reccomendations for main board/ram/proc/case and anything else you can think might help it perform well

lmimmfn

ive been thinking of doing the same thing as i use my gaming rig to serve my HTPC but its a bit heavy on the juice to throw on to watch a movie , i might do it in a few months.

Id go AMD as theyre more power effecient, just spent a few mins on overclockers and id build something like this:
AMD II 250 - £60
Asus M4A785TD-M Evo AMD 785G( has integrated gfx ) - £70
2 Gig OCZ DDR3 - £21
Corsair CX 400W - £37
Antec 300 Three Hundred Ultimate Gaming Case - £43
Total delivered would be ~270Euro

I have a load of harddrives that i stick in something like that. Only chose that gaming case as its a full tower with 6 harddrive slots but you could use a cheaper midi case.

The other alternative is to buy a core 2 system second hand, i might consider this also, i sold one of my core 2's earlier in the year for 200euro for e6400+Evga 680i+2 Gig ram + ati 3850, im sure they will be a lot cheaper now.

Tillotson

I've been looking at making a new fileserver for a while.

The case is the hardest part of this. p183 mini from ebuyer at £52
An atom board with 4 SATA connectors can be had for around £60
You can always get a pci raid card if you require more drives, you can
pick up for around 60.
Then all you have to find is cheap psu (120w will probably do),
1GB DDR, your hard disks and a linux distro,
I'd probably use OpenSolaris for ZFS.

If I'm reading wikipedia right it says that you need 50.3Mbit/sec throughput
for each blue ray movie. This probably drops significantly with downloaded
movies: 4GB * 8 * 1000 = 32000Mbit/1.5 hour = 5Mbit/s???

Streaming radio - that's like max 256Kb/s per stream, probably 64Kb/s

So lets say, worst case scenario, 2 people streaming 50GB bluerays and 4
people listening to radio. Then you need to push (100.6 + 1)Mbit/sec.

A single un-raided disk will give you over 100MB/sec = 800Mb/sec
Obviously reads won't be sequential, but even still, no need for raid.

A gigabit network will sustain throughput of 400Mb/sec worst case which
still leaves you good.

lmimmfn

well im using a crappy 802.11b and sharing disks with Windows file sharing, i have 0 problems playing 1080p movies using xbmc, if i put a server upstairs though id want N or N+

ntlbell

lmimmfn wrote: »

well im using a crappy 802.11b and sharing disks with Windows file sharing, i have 0 problems playing 1080p movies using xbmc, if i put a server upstairs though id want N or N+

There will be gig e links from the htpc's back to the switch/file server.

it will be just the radio's streaming the mp3's over wireless.