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:
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
The Bitfenix Shinobi case potentially holds 8 hard drives, more than any of the other cases I’d considered. It’s also sleek & simple in appearance, quiet and offers awesome value for money as it’s sub £50 in the UK.
The motherboard & processor are both solid, offering everything I’ll need from them without ever needing the option to overclock. Why not an i3 you ask? Right now, in the UK an i3 ships at around £89 & while a fantastic processor, I’d hate to see it go to waste in a low-spec server build like this.
RAM & PSU are the same, more than ample for what this build require, and again, at excellent price points meaning the entire budget for this build could be kept well under the £350 I’d envisioned for it. Parts haven’t been ordered yet, but I’ll post a final list once I’ve settled on everything. For now, this spec’s pretty much finalised though so hopefully ordering soon. Parts ordered last night after swapping out the Western Digital 1TB Green drive for the Seagate 2TB – thanks for the steal of a deal, Ebuyer! Build coming soon!