Server Options Options

[Shub0xx]

Hey everyone,

It's been a crazy time since I was here last, with so much stuff going on in my personal life.. It's not all sorted out yet, but I'm getting there..

I need some help.. I'm looking at downsizing my main rig, and transferring all of my file sharing tasks to a separate machine. I'm looking at possibly building a server (or buying an off the shelf option) and running that for file sharing and streaming to tv devices..

Now... Do I go out and custom build myself a system, or do I go find myself a cheap NAS and run that? I'm currently operating on a limited budget of about $600. Because it will be "always-on" I want a low power system.

Any suggestions?

[Jen]

Hey everyone,

It's been a crazy time since I was here last, with so much stuff going on in my personal life.. It's not all sorted out yet, but I'm getting there..

I need some help.. I'm looking at downsizing my main rig, and transferring all of my file sharing tasks to a separate machine. I'm looking at possibly building a server (or buying an off the shelf option) and running that for file sharing and streaming to tv devices..

Now... Do I go out and custom build myself a system, or do I go find myself a cheap NAS and run that? I'm currently operating on a limited budget of about $600. Because it will be "always-on" I want a low power system.

Any suggestions?

What I have currently is the following:

Dell Optiplex 760 that I upgraded the chip to a 64bit capable chip
Added 8GB of DDR2 ram
Put a 1TB HDD in it.

Then I virtualised a tonne of my normal "Desktop operations" into virtual machines.

The virtual machines do the work, and pump the output of the work into a Buffalo 4 bay NAS running RAID 5 with 4 x 4TB disks.