Harry G;302035 Wrote: > My needs are similar to those of Ron M but a little more specific and > for a larger music collection. > > Currently, I have two wired and one wireless SB3's, streaming a library > of 96,000 songs, mostly in flac from my home office XP machine running > SlimServer 6.3.1 (I know its ancient but it runs and I've been too busy > with work). > > I'd like to move my music playback to a dedicated server running > SqueezeCenter to free up resources on my work machine and hopefully > lower my electric bill. I'm in rural Hawaii. We have the highest energy > costs in the country and with the oil situation, the surcharge goes up > every month. > > Ready made machines like the HP home server make little sense here as > any factory service is 2500 miles away. > > I'm thinking of having my local repair and "we build it for you" > computer shop put together a low powered machine to just stream music, > using the Inguz EQ plugin, into the Squeezeboxes and possibly stream > video to a few UPNP client devices that now stream from attached USB > drives. > > The plan is to run Linux, probably Ubuntu and do a software RAID 5 > using five 1TB drives. > > I would like to control this, including boot, from an XP tablet and > continue ripping and tagging at my office machine. > > Does this make sense? If so, can anyone suggest how fast a processor > and how much RAM I need? Any reason I should use Windows Home Server > instead of Linux?
SC's CPU requirements are modest as are (I assume) video streaming requirements. The limiting factor here is inguz, from http://inguzaudio.com/usage/caveats/performance/ inguz Wrote: > The system requirements specs indicate a 2GHz CPU, and this really is a > realistic baseline. > > Running room-correction and other filters takes quite a lot of > processing power: on a 2GHz system, the CPU will typically run at > about 20% usage when music is playing. This figure will be slightly > higher for non-Windows systems. > > If you have more than one Squeezebox or Transporter (not synchronized), > the music signal is processed for each one separately. If processing > for each one uses a fifth of the computers processing power, then > obviously this sets an upper limit on the number of squeezeboxes which > can be supported simultaneously. > > If your PC is used heavily for other things, then you may find that > InguzDSP has a noticeable impact on the PC performance. Your mileage > may vary, of course, but dont try running on a 1GHz P3; it just wont > work. To save a bit of money you may want to go with an AMD processor. The Intel Core 2 Duos would work very well with such a large CPU requirement but as they're the current performance champs, they come at a premium. If performance depends only on processor speed as inguz states, you'll need a middle-of-the-line AMD processor. Compare prices carefully, AMD is priced close to Intel near the middle-of-the-line and an Intel processor will have a performance advantage. In terms of RAM, the more the better. SC performance will depend greatly on available RAM. Ordinarily 1 GB would be fine but with your large library and inguz go with 2 GB at least. Other than some learning time, there would be no advantage going with Windows Server over Linux here. Linux manages RAM better and is generally lighter on resources so your CPU and RAM goes further but unfortunately note the performance hit inguz has on Linux. > I should probably add that I know near nothing of Linux but am good at > learning by doing and of the two key guys at the computer shop, one > uses a simple Squeezebox system and the other has expertise with > Ubuntu, so I'm not alone blundering in the dark. I hope to share with > them any suggestions the group may have. Ubuntu is very popular. You have a very nice GUI but once you get comfortable, you may want to get familiar with doing things via the CLI. With SC, this is very easy - there's not much to do via the CLI, most administration is over the web interface. Once you get familiar enough with the CLI, you can gain additional performance by going with Ubuntu Server and doing away with the GUI entirely. -- Mark Lanctot ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Mark Lanctot's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=2071 View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=47243
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