old hardware as file server

[gechustyle]

Hi all!

I want to set up a file server using some (very) old hardware. My requirement is mainly to feed Kodi with movies, music etc ..

The hardware, which was ordered 2007-10-21 (!), consists of these components:

Motherboard: Asus P5K-V https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P5KV/
CPU: INTEL CORE 2 DUO E6750 2.66GHZ 4MB 1333MHZ
RAM: 4 GB


The motherboard contains SATA2 interfaces; either via Jmicron 363, or Intel ICH9. Since I don´t plan to run raid I´m think the later option (Intel) is the preferred choice.

The motherboard is either PCIx 1.0, or PCIx 1.1, and contains one slot which has the physical size of x16, but only supports a maximum of 4x speeds.

According to the documentation should it be possible to run a harddrive using AHCI. I plan to invest in one big drive like WD Red (or similar).

The motherboard contains aa 1 Gbit NIC (Atheros L1 ) which should have driver support in linux, which is good because I plan to run Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
My thoughts are that CPU and RAM will be sufficient. But what about network IO or harddrive IO? Guess I could add a PCIx card if one of them is likely to prove insufficent.

Should I even consider spending the time required to set it all up? Or simply spend some money to get new hardware?

 

[jimbob200521]

I recently set up a Plex media server is my house and ran gigabit to it. The server has 4gb of RAM, a Core 2 Quad Q6600 (2.4ghz), and of course my storage devices. It's got about 3tb or so of storage and it works beautifully. The big thing that sucks horsepower for me is trans-coding when needed which is why I used a quad core. For what you are trying to do (simply streaming media) what you have will be plenty of horsepower.

That being said, the biggest benefit to newer technology is power efficiency. Your older system, like mine, will suck more power than a newer system would. A new Atom or similar server would sip power compared to your older dual core or my quad core. But if that doesn't concern you (it didn't me) then you have a great base for a file server.

 

[XavierMace]

FYI, PCI-X and PCI-e are not the same thing. Your board has PCI-e slots.

 

[mvbighead]

Transcoding would be a no for your gear, but for simple file serving it will work perfectly fine. As mentioned, power efficiency won't be the greatest, but I wouldn't be that worried about it.

I say use it as you suggested.

 

[gechustyle]

Thanks for the feedback!