Server Build: Components

These days it can be a bit of a nightmare keeping track of all your media, especially when there’s more than one PC in the home. Right now all of our main media is kept on the other half’s PC, modest enough at 500GB with no back up. I know, I know, no backup – crazy right?! My own media, again 500GB is stored on a 2009 Mac Mini, and some more of it’s on my MacBook, the latter of which IS backed up to an external 500GB WD hard drive. This server is designed to centralise our media storage and give us somewhere to house our other PC’s backups. Thus begins the search for our server build components.

The budget for this project’s very modest, emphasising packing power per £GBP, hehe. The computer itself needs to be ventilated effectively as it’ll be on for long periods, even if the system won’t be pulling a heavy workload. Since it’ll be on more than most of our systems, it also needs to be quiet and draw as little power as possible. After  a lot of deliberation, I’ve chosen the following  components initially:

Server Build Components

Bitfenix Shinobi Case – Black, non-windowed version.
Gigabyte H61MA-DV3 Intel H61 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard
Intel Celeron G530 2.4GHz Socket LGA 1155 Processor
Corsair Builder Series CX 430W V2 ’80 Plus’ Power Supply
Kingston HyperX Blu 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-10666C9 1333MHz Dual Channel RAM
Seagate 2TB BARRACUDA 3.5″ SATA-III Hard Drive – 7200RPM 64MB Cache
LG DVD 24x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter

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Future Projects

Right now I have a few projects I’d like to complete some day, the first of which is a fairly low-mid range PC offering hefty storage. Currently, John and I watch most of our media via a Playstation 3 console hooked up to our livingroom TV. It’s worked well for us so far, but now it’s becoming annoying trying to keep track of where we’re pulling our media from on our home network. Too many times we’ve sat down to get all comfy on the sofa and kick-started the PC to find that we’ve forgotten to boot up the relevant PC to stream our media from!

Before moving in together, I kept all my media on a Mac Mini which streamed to my own PS3 for viewing. Back at the flat, he had a PC hooked straight up to his TV & watched everything directly from there, avoiding any reliance on a home network. Recently space has also become an issue & with the price of hard drives still slowly crawling back to their pre-flood prices, they’ve still a long way to go before they’re as cheap as they once were. In response to a lot of this (and a few other reasons less pressing), I’ve been itching to get a few projects started. Rough details as follows:

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Finally A New Wireless Router!

Finally, the inevitable has happened. Last year, we were still on 20Mb cable broadband and enjoying full speed via our admittedly very standard Belkin G-range router. By October, we’d upgraded to 50Mb and this week we’ve bumped up to 60Mb. Full speeds via our modem, 20ish via the router – even wired! We’ve made do … Read more