[king_play334]

Well, I'm about to move into my new house and i need a file server to host blu-rays, movies, pictures, etc. I need it to be connected to 6 of the house computers excluding my signature rig. I'll probably do everything over a network and i'll be using 25MBPS down and 7MBPS up.
What parts should i use and how should i go about it?

 

[ComGuards]

Quote:

Originally Posted by king_play334 Well, I'm about to move into my new house and i need a file server to host blu-rays, movies, pictures, etc. I need it to be connected to 6 of the house computers excluding my signature rig. I'll probably do everything over a network and i'll be using 25MBPS down and 7MBPS up. What parts should i use and how should i go about it?

First things first - how much are you willing to spend?

And what kind of network? Wired gigabit? 802.11n?

 

[the_beast]

What do you actually want to do with it? Your internet speeds are largely irrelevant. How many and what kind of file transfers will you do with it, do you want it to do video transcoding etc, how many concurrent streams do you need it to support, how much storage space do you need, what is the budget?

We need a little more info...

 

[king_play334]

im willing to spend up to $800, i know it doesn't take much to run a server like this. i perfer atleast 5TB then as i need to, i'll add HDD's. what do you guys think? i don't know much about servers and stuff.

 

[the_beast]

how many computers do you want to stream video to at once, and do you want to be able to do anything else with your server or just use it to hold your media?

 

[ComGuards]

Quote:

Originally Posted by king_play334 im willing to spend up to $800, i know it doesn't take much to run a server like this. i perfer atleast 5TB then as i need to, i'll add HDD's. what do you guys think? i don't know much about servers and stuff.

You don't need a real "server" for what you want to do. Desktop components will work just fine for what you need done. You can stream off of a client OS too - Windows XP, Windows 7, whatever works.

5TB for $800 might be pushing it, especially if you want 5TB of redundant storage. If you're going with 5x1TB drives, then you can get a motherboard and cpu combination for relatively cheap.

Really. Don't think "server". Just think of "desktop with storage", That's all you really need.

Of course, if you want to have the system perform additional roles, then there will be other factors to consider.

 

[Manyak]

- How many clients do you want to be able to stream movies concurrently?

- Do you want the server to do anything else besides store and host files?

- Do you want some sort of redundancy for your data? If so, would you prefer it at the hard drive level or at the file level?

- Are you familiar with Linux or Unix?