New Home Media/File Server Build

[sholling]

I just built myself a new media/file server for home. One of the goals was to reduce the number of hours a week that I run my desktop PC/media repository because it sucks electricity and generates a ton of heat. This one should use about 1/4 the power and generate very little heat.

Server Hardware List:

• Apex Vortex mid tower case with 4 front USB ports. A pretty decent little budget case if you don't mind the bright blue lighting. It'll live in my home-office as a nightlight.
• Asus E35M1-M PRO E350 motherboard w/CPU. It lacks the latest audio chipset but has lots of expandability while only drawing 18w.
• 1x 4GB of DDR3 1066. The Asus motherboard has a rep for being picky so I stayed on the compatibility list.
• Thermaltake TR-380P 380W high efficiency power supply.
• 1x WD Black 500GB hard drive (boot drive) that I had on hand.
• 2x WD Green 3TD hard drives mirrored using Windows mirroring.
  I deliberately did not want an optical drive permanently installed.

Software List:

• Windows 7 Professional - chosen over "Home" because of its remote access feature.
• DLNA server to be determined.
• GoodSync for automated backups.

It's up and running and I'm in the process of copying files over to it. The eventual plan is to add another pair of 3TB drives as a mirrored set and then an add an external eSATA 4.5TB RAID5 array that I have plugged into my main PC. I don't see myself needing more than that but I can always add 2 more external arrays.

I actually built two computers this weekend but I'll get to the second build later. It's spiffy.

[Boristheblade]

Looks good! I have a streamers with the AT5IONT-I board and its picky with RAM too.

A while back I read that you would need to run a SATA card or something to use 3tb and up hd's. You didn't have any issues?

[sholling]

Looks good! I have a streamers with the AT5IONT-I board and its picky with RAM too.

A while back I read that you would need to run a SATA card or something to use 3tb and up hd's. You didn't have any issues?

I think the controller card is for older motherboards. This MB includes five SATA 3 ports which seem to be working fine.

[Boristheblade]

I see, cool..

[QuarterBoreGunner]

NERDS!

No seriously something like this is on my future 'to-do' list; I'd love to get away from physical media eventually. Even DVDs take up too much damn space.

[sholling]

NERDS!

No seriously something like this is on my future 'to-do' list; I'd love to get away from physical media eventually. Even DVDs take up too much damn space.

I spent months converting my CD collection to flac files (like MP3s but full CD quality) and it's just awesome to be able to just load up albums and frequently watched DVDs and BDs (concerts etc) without getting out of your chair. I'll post the new media PC build to go along with this, but you really don't need a media PC when a Western Digital TV Live Plus will handle every music and almost every video format and costs less than $100. The only reason that I moved up was to take advantage of the new 24bit albums from HDTracks. The WDTV Live plays CD quality (16bit 44.1khz) flacs and DVD quality (16bit 48khz) flacs just fine, as well as DVD ISOs which a Media PC won't do. You can connect the WDTV live to your network or just load everything on an external hard drive. Audio is my other expensive hobby.

[Boristheblade]

NERDS!

No seriously something like this is on my future 'to-do' list; I'd love to get away from physical media eventually. Even DVDs take up too much damn space.

Yup! I have all my movies saved on to my server. This way I can watch them wherever I want in my house.

[Nose Nuggets]

with that utterly PUNY cpu heatsink fan, you could probably get away with no fan at all.

moving to a raid 5 configuration would be optimal. raid 5 with a hot-spare would be even better.

any reason you didnt go with windows home server?