suggestions on a budget file server

[footbal07]

well ive been thinking about it for a while and i would really like to have a separate file server. i will mainly use it to stream divx and mp3s along with general backup. i was planning something along the lines of a 700mhz-1ghz p3 s370, with 256 or 512 ram and 2 250gig hds. the only thing i will be buying new are the hard drives, the p3 mobo and cpu i want to get off ebay or here and i have some ram and misc parts i salvaged off my parents old 350p2. i will be running either suse 9.1 or mandrake 10 and maybe 2k pro on it. does this sound like it will be sufficient, and do you have any useful suggestions?

 

[DaveSimmons]

Win2K works fine with 250 GB drives once you install the right service pack (3?), though if the motherboard BIOS isn't new enough you might need a PCI IDE controller card (around $20 in FS/FT forum). 512 MB of RAM would be ideal.

700 MHz is fine for just serving files, though it's a little slow for ripping CDs and more than a little if you actually want to encode divx instead of just stream it.

My lossless FLAC music server is running on a Tualatin 1.3 GHz p3-celeron with 512 MB and Win2K server and 2 x 250 GB Maxtors for music (plus a 30 GB drive for the OS and a 120 GB drive for development files). 256 - 384 MB RAM would probably be enough, but I also use it for software development.

 

[footbal07]

yea ill use my main rig for encoding, i just want to use this for multimedia streaming and a part time private ftp.

 

[oldfart]

Sounds good.

I use an old Gateway desktop box I bought off the FS/T. It had a PII 450 and 96M ram. I had some parts lying around and upgraded it to a Celeron 1G in a Slocket, 384M ram. It has a 40 and an 80 gig HD. I run Linux on it. I run FTP server, SAMBA, spam filter, content filter, UPnP D5 media server, a few other things on it. Runs just fine.

 

[Quasmo]

I use an old toshiba 500mhz celeron laptop with a 6gb hard drive and 64mb of ram, as my Apache/PHP/MySQL server, and FTP server, and it runs pretty smoothly, so you should be very pleased with that setup

 

[footbal07]

well it looks like i can either trade a generic 400w psu i have sitting around for a 667 p3 and mobo along with some ram, or i can see what i can do with this abit bh6 mobo i have and get a slot p3 off ebay. also what do you guys recommend for cheap a ide controller? i want something that works well in linux.