eg4190 Wrote:I would definitely recommend building your own server over buying a pre-packaged one. Anything sold as a "server" seems to carry a $300-$400 price premium, and they only come with 4 drive bays for some reason. The key thing here is to make sure you're using cool, quiet, low-powered parts, because your server won't be handling many heavy processing tasks, and you don't want to drive up your electric bill and have guests ask why your vacuum cleaner is always on in your closet.
One thing to consider is that you don't necessarily *need* all of your hard drives to appear as one physical drive, particularly if you aren't concerned with fault tolerance. My feeling is, it would be pretty easy (if a huge hassle) to replace my media if any one of my hard drives died, so I just installed Ubuntu on a cheap machine with four 1.5 TB drives, sorted out my existing movies and TV shows, and pointed my nzb/torrent scripts to the least populated drive. When that one fills up I'll move onto the next one.
XBMC makes it very easy to merge multiple sources into one TV and movie library, so there's not much reason to pool the data just for convenience. XBMC doesn't care if you tell it that movies are in the Movies1 and Movies2 network shares. But if error tolerance is worth the premium to you then there are a lot of other solutions.
That is exectly what I did, and I am very happy with my server.
- Semprom L-1250 low power and cheap CPU (Eur 25!), ideal when coupled with an entry level cheap Mobo (in my case, Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2H)
- Fanless Noctua NH-U12P CPU cooler
- Silent Antec Solo Full Tower Case (can add 8Hdds easily, I have 5 now)
- Tucked under the staircase. It is completely silent, cool and low power
- Running Debian to do much more than just media serving.
- That all summed up I have a low-power, silent, scalable and powerful server for my needs.
About storage: I decided it was not worth the hassle of having RAID, LVM, etc, as that would most certainly make things hairy in case a real hard recover would be needed, particulaly now with such reliable HDs like the Green Caviars. I kept all HDs mounted individualy. And keep double backups (one offsite) for the most important data (photos, documents, family movies), single off-site backups for less important things like movies, TV Shows, etc.