Most important aspect of a file server?

[BigToque]

I've never built a file server before, but I want to have multiple family computers and I want all of them to be able to access the media, documents, etc.

My first assumption would be hard drive and network speed would be the most important as only the client machines would need powerful computers to do encoding/decoding of media.

Is this correct?

Since I need a lot of space, should I be looking at IDE/SATA drives? Or would I want to go SCSI?

 

[Pariah]

A home file server requires very little to serve its purpose well. Gigabit ethernet, and whatever storage space you require is about it. No need for SCSI. ATA/SATA doesn't matter, whatever the system can use and whatever is cheaper is what you should get. The rest of the system can be pieced together from whatever parts you have lying around as they won't affect performance.

 

[compuwiz1]

No huge processing power required either. I had one up until 2 years ago, that I was running dual PIII 600's on. Worked fine.

 

[imported_merv]

If you are just looking for a place to share files, have you looked into a NAS device?

 

[MercenaryForHire]

Originally posted by: BigToque
I've never built a file server before, but I want to have multiple family computers and I want all of them to be able to access the media, documents, etc.

My first assumption would be hard drive and network speed would be the most important as only the client machines would need powerful computers to do encoding/decoding of media.

Is this correct?

Since I need a lot of space, should I be looking at IDE/SATA drives? Or would I want to go SCSI?

Pretty much correct. Unless you're running GigE, your bottleneck will almost always be the network speed (100Mbit = <10MB/s)

Space-wise, IDE or SATA is your choice. It depends on if you're building from scratch or planning on using new parts, but a four-port SATA controller and four-pack of drives is pretty good. There's also the choice of "do you want RAID, backup, hot spare, etc".

- M4H

 

[smthmlk]

the most important thing for a file server is reliability, on the software and hardware levels.