Your thoughts on my build

Hey everyone. Long time lurker, first time poster.

So I've been using XMBC for about 3 months now. I started off with Openelec on a Raspberry Pi which worked out ok for me for about a month, but then I just couldn't handle how slow it was (256 MB model Pi) so I took one of my old laptops - a Dell XPS 17, formatted it and threw windows 7 and XBMC on it which is connected through HDMI to my home theater receiver and 52" TV. Unfortunately it only has a 320 GB drive so I've resorted to using an external eSATA 1TB drive to hold everything. Now I'm faced with running out of drive space and I'd like to get away from having the laptop doing all the downloading, ripping, and storage all while acting as the HTPC as well.

I've come across a great situation where I have been given an older Dell Poweredge 2950 III with dual Xeon Quad Core X5450's, 24 GB of ram and 6 X 146GB 10K SAS drives. So I figure I'll use this for all the downloading, ripping and of course some storage, and an older PC that has 6 SATA ports on it as a NAS server using FreeNAS. I could easily write a scrips (of download one) that moves all files from a certain directory on the PE 2950 to the NAS server, and I'll stream everything to the XPS 17 connected to the HTS. I Fugger the dual Xeons will be excellent for ripping and encoding as it has a ton of processing power, and a NAS server running FreeNAS with 6 2 TB or 6 3 TB drives will be plenty of space for the future.

Any thoughts on weather this is a good idea? I would like to have one machine dedicated to ripping and downloading and other miscellaneous HTPC related tasks, one for storage and one for the HTPC itself. I could easily build one system to do everything but that would cost a few $$$$ and I currently have all the above equipment available (except the drives for the NAS server.

Sounds great to me,...but if you're having second thoughts,..I could give you my mailing address.

Hahaha! I doubt I'm going to have second thoughts unless of course it just isn't doable! The only thing that concerns me is the electrical cost. The PE 2950 fully loaded as it is draws as little as 295 watts of power when idle and up to 500 watts at 80% load. just idling (which it will be doing 95% of the time) I'm looking at around 7 KWh a day, or 212 KWh a month, Right now electricity goes for $0.08 per KWh so I'm looking at around $17 a month for the poweredge alone, probably another $10 a month for the NAS server. It isn't much considering its running $2000 in equipment but if I start hitting heavy server loads, then I could be looking at $30 - $40 a month just to power the server, Lets hope the cost of electricity doesn't go up! I my have to throw a small Gbps switch in there somewhere if my Apple Airport cant handle the required transfer speeds.

If your looking to pickup a PE 2950 server, they can be had for fairly cheap on EBay. I've seen them as low as $250. Shipping can be about as expensive as the server though. They weigh around 55 - 60 pounds. The HP Proliant servers are excellent as well - just make sure to pick up a Proliant DL260 or DL380 that is Generation 4 or 5.

Thanks,..but I'll stick with my unRaid server.
Yeah,...the power-thing is often overlooked,....until you get the next month's bill.

my server is running on a 3220t - the thing eats less power than a light bulb and from what I can notice way to overkill

Mine's on an E35M1-I but I don't do anything fancier than share files. I'll probably be moving it to an older H55/i3-540 in an Antec 300 tower I have that is doing nothing so I can take the E35M1-I and make it into an OpenELEC PC for the kids. The one they have now the CPU fan is shot and AFAICT it's not replaceable.