Need some advice on setting up a home server.

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emmdotenn

n00b
Joined
Jan 5, 2012
Messages
3
Hey guys,

New to the forum and am new to building servers.

So I have a bit of a situation here. I have around 6-7 computers/consoles in my house and I would like them to all have access to my collection of tv shows/movies/music. I currently run everything off my gaming rig with a 3 TB dynamic drive (1 TB and a 2 TB drive combined via disk management), where I do all my sickbeard/torrents download and share everything to my ps3/tablet/other computers in the house.

I have two old computers sitting there collecting dust (an old P4 and a old Athlon 2500+) that I could potentially build a home/media server with that I can VNC using my gaming rig and perform all my downloads for me (it seems like sickbeard/couchpotato/sabnzbd doesn't like my gaming rig very much lately and I've had a lot of freezing up issues).

After doing some research, It appears that the old WHS isn't compatible with Windows 7, which is what most of my computers are running on.

So my question is: should I run it as a FreeNAS or should I get WHS??

Both my old systems have 1GB of ram and run IDE hard drives (I think one of them is capable of running SATA but I'm not sure if the new hard drives are compatible).

Ideally, I want to keep my gaming rig separate from running transcoding and downloading, and have my ps3 or xbox run as my Media player (might think about getting an HTPC down the road to get XMBC since I don't really use consoles for gaming).

Hope someone with a similar situation can provide some insight. Thanks!

P.S. Sorry for the amount of reading!
 
WHS v1 works just fine with Win7 (I was using it for about 6 months before the old server ate it and I switched to ZFS). So that shouldn't a concern.
 
Fair enough. Now given that the mother board is fairly old it only has 2 sata ports. Is there some sort of IDE to sata connector that I can use so I can put more than 2 hard drives in???
 
Just a thought... if you want to do transcoding, and offload that stuff, you may want to see if you can sell/ donate those older PC's that are doing nothing, and just get something that is a newer generation part. Even a low end current-gen core i3 or i5 will be more power friendly, be much faster for transcoding, have more onboard expansion ports, and etc.

If you end up paying even $40 for a 4-port add-in SATA controller, you start getting close with selling the old boxes to a H67 motherboard (likely 4x 3.0gbps and 2x 6.0gbps ports, maybe more) and a core i3/ i5 (can be had for around $180 new), and that will do Quick Sync. You could also look at the AMD chips and save a bit more if you didn't want to use QS.

Just some thoughts.
 
Yea it's looking like it. I'm just pricing out what the costs are for me to add in SATA controllers and all that.
 
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