combine pc and home server a good idea?

[hillbillie]

Hi all,

Recently I had a server built for me, and now with the rising cost of electricity, gas, you name it, I am curious if its a good idea to just add the hard drives that are in this server to my wife's computer.

This server has:
650 watt power supply
5 500gb hard drives full of music video and pictures
a xeon 2.8 cpu
tyan 2723 motherboard

my son in law started this server in a Supermicro case,which is pretty big, My wife uses the computer the most with her Sims 2 game, internet and outlook email. I'm worried that if she gets a computer virus or something that I will lose all of the stuff that are on the extra hard drives. But right now money is tight, and I don't want to be paying an extra 25 - 40 dollars a month to have a computer do nothing but sit there and every once in a while we listen to music from it.

I would appreciate any comments from everyone and anyone that may be thinking of the same thing.

 

[450]

As long as the computer has a good firewall and anti virus that is updated regularly, you should be fine. But ask your wife first if she'd care about the extra HDD noise and heat. 5 HDD's (plus her existing ones) make a good amount of noise.

Also, you could just turn it off when you are not using it. The 1-2 minutes to wait for it to boot up shouldn't be too much of a mood killer.