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Ask Slashdot: Best Kit For a Home Media Server?
First time accepted submitter parkejr writes "I started off building a media library a few years ago with an old PC running Ubuntu. Folders for photos, ogg vorbis music from my CD collection, and x264 encoded mkv movies. I have a high spec machine for encoding, but over the years I've moved the server to a bigger case, with 8 TB of disk capacity, and reverted back to Debian, but still running with the same AMD Sempron processor and 2GB RAM. It's working well, it's also the family mail server, and the kids are starting to use it for network storage, and it runs both link and twonkyserver, but my disks are almost full, and there are no more internal slots. The obvious option to me is to add in a couple of SATA PCI cards, to give me 4 more drives, and buy an externally powered enclosure, but that doesn't feel very elegant. I'm a bit of an amateur, so I'd like some advice. Should I start looking at a rack system? Something that can accommodate, say, 10 3.5" drives (I'm thinking long term, and some redundancy)? Also, what about location — I could run some cat6 to the garage and move it out of the house, in case noise is an issue. Finally, what about file format, file system, and OS/software? I'm currently running with ext3 and Debian Squeeze. Happy with my audio encoding choice, but not sure about x264 and mkv. I'd also consider different media server software, too. Any comments appreciated."
Well, how should we know what price you're willing to spend? If you're just wanting to know what rack systems are available that can support 10 hard drives and how much they cost, can't you just Google that?
How could we answer this? We don't know what location is most convenient for you. We don't know how much physical space you have available in your house or your garage. Are your family's file-serving needs so extreme that you can't even rely on wireless networking?
You're running out of disk space, yet you're encoding audio with a technically inferior format that uses more space for less quality than other formats.
Honestly, based on the rattling off of technical specs, it sounds like this project is more about tinkering and tweaking. There are plenty of pre-built Linux-based media server projects (I'd suggest other operating systems, but I know you'll only accept Linux), but you're not going to accept those solutions because you want to tweak and do it all yourself. For crying out loud, you're running your own family mail server and 8TB file server in an era of Facebook-based communication, web-based email, and cloud storage/streaming services.
All you people talking about using Raid are completely clueless and obviously have never actually implemented it. You are just spewing crap you've read about. In the real world, this would be the worst thing to do in a home set up for a media server.
Good luck spending 600-1000 on a decent raid card for your home use...Good luck expanding it when you want to add a new drive, or replace drives with larger ones. Have fun with all the disks spinning up for 2 hours while you watch a movie.