That should be plenty for a media server, although I would probably put an intel gigabit nic since I have a few of those sitting. I have a ReadyNAS NV+ that streams to 3 rooms and holds network shares for each user also. My backup server for stuff I don't need as often is a cheap 2U rackmount system I picked up for $50 on ebay. I started with 2 gigs of ram and dropped to 1 after not noticing any difference. I've got a pentium-d cpu in it and 4 external removable sata bays. I'm running FreeNAS on it and also did some manual tweaking to get a quake3 server and a few other goodies running on it. I've done file transfers nonstop for up to 2 days (backing up movies/TV shows on the other server and used it at the same time for gaming and streaming just to see if I could lock it up.
lopaka ________________________________ From: Joshua MacCraw <maccr...@gmail.com> To: hardware@hardwaregroup.com Sent: Wed, August 11, 2010 12:49:52 PM Subject: [H] DIY JOBD NAS/Mediaserver How much horsepower do you figure is needed to serve up a few (4 max likely) video streams of data? Looking at resurrecting my old A7N8X PC as a linux NAS/mediaserver to serve up media files (MKV, VOB, MP3, FLAC) over my wired network. It has the XP-M CPU overclocked (3200?), 1GB RAM, & dual 100Mb Ethernet. It seems a shame to let it collect dust and NAS/media server solutions seem to be so expensive! I won't be doing transcoding but might want to be able to transmux for the PS3 which may or may not be aided by the ATI X850 in the box. There's only 2 SATA ports but I'm thinking I can easily get an inexpensive card, RAID or not, to support 3-6 drives I'll move over from my workstation. 2 services come to mind: SAMBA & some DNLA server like PS3MediaServer, TVersity, or Myth. Assume I can run all that under Ubuntu or something with this low end hardware? Cheap 8 bay case, 350-500W PSU, RAID card, maybe 2GB DDR RAM still got to be way cheaper than a media server, no?
