Advice on a simple digital music file server?

[_Mhz]

Hey.

I've been thinking of having a file/media server in the loft for sometime now. Basicly I'd like to dump my digitised music collection from this computer to the server and be able to access it wirelessly instead, with the added benefits of more disk space on this machine AND so my family members can also stream our music collection from the server to their laptops/ portable wifi media players.

I've been looking on ebay for cheap secondhand/refurb servers but don't know how powerful I should be going as I don't want to be spending alot of money as this is mainly a nice hobby than anything else. (my other hobby of music production sucks more money than I can justify already )

at any one time there will only be a max of 4 people connected to the server.

most importantly I will want to be serving digital music and simple documents but I am having thoughts of streaming video too (our dvd collection, albiet small one) however I believe I would have problems regarding insuffcient wireless bandwidth for good quality video streaming even if I convert them to xvid?

If we are concentrating on my main point of just serving digital music to a few computers would something like these be sufficient?
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/COMPAQ-PROLIA...10QQihZ011QQcategoryZ1484QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

or

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Dell-PowerEdg...83QQihZ019QQcategoryZ1484QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

or am I being naive about the processing requirments here?

Many thanks

 

[Trizoy]

Fpr 4 people server processing wont be the problem, it will be available badwidth. Do you plan on doing this across a LAN or across the internet to other remote locations? For this amount if people you could just use a regular PC as the server.

 

[tlarkin]

If it is simply file sharing and you don't want a domain, manage users, group policies, permissions, etc....

Just get a decently cheap PC, a large HD, slap linux on it, run samba (it is easier than you think) and then create a directory and give ownership to the people who will be using it for media, and you are done.

Linux is free, takes less hardware to run, and has the possibility for expansion. Even though a small amount of people will be using it, windows xp only allows up to 15 connections at any given time to one system. Linux/Samba does not have this limitation.

 

[jbrown456]

I'll give my go here.... I run a Pentium 3 computer with 128MB SD ram as a media server AND a web server. I have music and movies on it and they are streamed to many computers at once and the server is also hosting my website with large files on it, and it runs just fine. Any servers like you have shown from eBay would be great for what you are doing (almost overkill), except for hard drive size. For a large movie and music collection I would recommend no less than 250GB of storage (however if you bought something off of eBay, you could always upgrade it later).

EDIT: If the rest of your computers are running windows, use windows on your server, it is much easier to setup. (the connections between the computers that is, not the actual os).

 

[tlarkin]

Except windows server OSes run for 1000s of dollars and it is freaking pointless to use windows 2003 server to host media and a webpage. Not to mention the hardware needed to run it.

I will suggest this once more....Linux + decently cheap PC = great file server, and its not that hard to set up in all honesty.

 

[The_Other_One]

Dude, unless you plan to have more than say 5 people accessing it at a time, something like a low-end PIII would work perfectly. It could probably even manage more people than that, but I've never really tried to load one down.

 

[Motoxrdude]

Dude, unless you plan to have more than say 5 people accessing it at a time, something like a low-end PIII would work perfectly. It could probably even manage more people than that, but I've never really tried to load one down.

Yuep, my home server is a celeron 433mhz and it does the job quite well, even when I had 11 people over for a lan party.

 

[tlarkin]

I think I just need to make a "How To:" document for setting up a linux file server for simple media sharing. Probably won't be able to do it till after the new year though, not enough time to take tons of screen shots and compile them in a document then add detailed text, but maybe if I get time I will do so. Hopefully it will clear up what a lot of people keep asking. I mean storing data over a network does not require a lot, unless you are doing something major, which no one on this forum is probably doing.