streaming media hardware q's

[BKLounger]

I'm not sure whether to put this under networking or hardware. But right now i have a computer with a bunch of hard drives set up on my network. My xbox connects to it to stream media. The problem right now is it sounds like a jet engine probably a combination of many things, it wasn't really built for sound. But i have an old 500mhz machine which is whisper quiet ( my current rig is 2ghz). My question is if i plop the hard drives into the old machine am i going to notice a difference when i am streaming my media over to the xbox

 

[Lord Evermore]

You should see zero performance difference, unless that old machine has a really truly awful network card or drivers for it.

You can watch your network transfer speeds from your computer right now, and see how little bandwidth is being used (I use NetMeter myself so I can watch whether anything is sucking up bandwidth, but you can also set up the figure it out with the Networking tab in Windows Task Manager.

Basically, think about the bitrates of the files you're streaming. 128Kbps MP3, maybe 256Kbps. Great video is only a few megabits per second. Even a 10Mbps LAN can handle it. As for the hard drive performance, even an old PIO mode interface is 128Mbps throughput (16MBps), so even if that machine were so old that DMA mode wasn't supported, you'd be fine.

You could use an old Pentium Classic for a file server.