Guest Trillian Posted July 28, 2009 Share Posted July 28, 2009 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. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Volunteer Kazz Posted July 28, 2009 Volunteer Share Posted July 28, 2009 You'll probably have more luck if you post your question in the Digital TV Tuner Cards & Network Media Players forum. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Trillian Posted July 28, 2009 Share Posted July 28, 2009 You'll probably have more luck if you post your question in the Digital TV Tuner Cards & Network Media Players forum. Thanks Kazz Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
darent74 Posted July 28, 2009 Share Posted July 28, 2009 Thanks Kazz 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 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
masterleet1503561330 Posted July 29, 2009 Share Posted July 29, 2009 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 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raZorTT Posted July 30, 2009 Share Posted July 30, 2009 (edited) 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 July 30, 2009 by raZorTT Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
michaeljayc Posted July 30, 2009 Share Posted July 30, 2009 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 That is a nice looking appliance. I'm just watching a video review. Michael. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
raZorTT Posted July 31, 2009 Share Posted July 31, 2009 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 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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