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Guest Trillian

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Guest Trillian

Hi Guys,

Just want to pick brains for ideas on building a server to store my large collection of dvds, music and photos. I am at present using my PC as a server, but I would like to have a dedicated server with about 5 1TB hdds. Does anyone have any sugggestions on motherboards or cpus to run it. It will be hooked up to my PS3 so I guess I won't really need anything with highend graphics or audio (if at all), just something with a bit of grunt and speed. I will also be mainly using PS3 Media Server to stream.

Any help would be greatly appreciated as this will be my first and I guess fairly ambitious project. :wacko::unsure:

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Thanks Kazz :D

Trillian, If your going for a system to do this, most mid range motherboards have enough sata connections for running that many drives. The line between a pc and server on the home front these days is quite small compared to previous years.

For what your doing, a reasonable pc motherboard with adequate ram and processor will do the job well.

Asus or Gigabyte , either brand, i prefer Asus myself as Drivers and upgrades for firmware are very good.

Look for a board that has quite a few sata connections.

Running that much data you may want to put some redundancy into your system to run raid. Raid 5 is best for file storage, you can setup raid 1 for the Operating system for speed and some redundancy, Raid 1+0 ( mirror and stripe for OS performance )

Intel or Athlon which ever you like.

For the purpose of streaming media, an

Core 2 duo would be more than enough.

Streaming to a PS3 , great idea, but some shortcomings., PS3 cannot stream DTS HD audio ( from a blu ray rip ) and some other formats which are quite annoying. Have started looking at

an HDX1000 http://www.hdx1000.net.au as a replacement.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread....3747&page=6

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Trillian, If your going for a system to do this, most mid range motherboards have enough sata connections for running that many drives. The line between a pc and server on the home front these days is quite small compared to previous years.

For what your doing, a reasonable pc motherboard with adequate ram and processor will do the job well.

Asus or Gigabyte , either brand, i prefer Asus myself as Drivers and upgrades for firmware are very good.

Look for a board that has quite a few sata connections.

Running that much data you may want to put some redundancy into your system to run raid. Raid 5 is best for file storage, you can setup raid 1 for the Operating system for speed and some redundancy, Raid 1+0 ( mirror and stripe for OS performance )

Intel or Athlon which ever you like.

For the purpose of streaming media, an

Core 2 duo would be more than enough.

Streaming to a PS3 , great idea, but some shortcomings., PS3 cannot stream DTS HD audio ( from a blu ray rip ) and some other formats which are quite annoying. Have started looking at

an HDX1000 http://www.hdx1000.net.au as a replacement.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread....3747&page=6

Raid5 would definitely be the way to go. 0+1 is great but you'd only have half as much space (as you need to mirror each striped drive as opposed to raid 5 that only needs 1 drive for parrity). Though not all motherboards will do raid5. If that's the case, you'd need to either run linux and do a software raid or get a raid card (expensive but prefered as the card does the raid and the OS just see's a single drive, so you can trash the OS and not lose your data)

Really comes down to how much you want to spend :)

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Hey Trillian,

Depending on you budget you might want to consider this from the UK

http://www.tranquilpc-shop.co.uk/acatalog/SQA-5H.html

It comes with Windows home server installed (as well as squeeze centre and other bits and pieces) and it lets you do backups of any laptops or PC on your network. and you can also set up duplication on folders so if a HDD died you don't lose the data.

I have one of these at home and it's never missed a beat.

Cheers,

Simon

Edited by raZorTT
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That is a nice looking appliance. I'm just watching a video review.

Michael.

Yeah it's a little ripper. I also bought one of their 3.5" enclosures which uses the same holder/sled as the server, so you can pull the HDD out of the enclosure and plug it straight into the server to copy anything to and from. Sure beats copying via USB ;)

Cheers,

Simon

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