Home media Server

[Nitro1]

Looking for a home server What do you recommend. Account for price and amount of data able to store.

 

[bropo]

well, if youre tech savvy make your own with linux and a crappy computer, the specifications are up to you!

 

[cz3ch]

well, if youre tech savvy make your own with linux and a crappy computer, the specifications are up to you!

I side with bropo. You can piece together a rather large capacity SAN/NAS for 400-500USD. It will play nice with pretty much any OS you throw at it.

 

[kurzz]

The new HP Mediasmart server works with Macs and works great with Time Machine, iTunes and as a general media server. The only drawback is that the control interface requires Windows (and no, it doesn't work in Parallels or virtualization mode).

 

[bartzilla]

I has a thecus n3200 NAS. It has a few extras to serve content but its essentially happy raiding my data onto 3x1Tb disks and throwing it out to 2 macs and 1 windows machine via smb or afp.

I can't talk about performance benchmarks but I can tell you it streams music and video just fine to windows machine running itunes and windows media player and mini running plex, which is what i need it to do, and that counts rather more to me than a benchmark does ;-)

It's pretty quiet (not silent when being hammered to stream movies though) and sleeps when idle (which is good as its currently in my bedroom while i redecorate teh house), doesn't generally give me much hassle at all. Reasonable web interface that works with firefox, safari, from windows or mac.

Other than the fact that when I upgrade I'll probably want something that supports more/bigger drives, I'd be happy to buy another one, lets put it that way.

 

[Nitro1]

I built a server on newegg for about 370 with a 1tb HD. I of course will add more when the money comes up. It is going to be a summer project for me and a buddy. pretty nice specs. Motherboard, CPU, Ram case, Power supply, and the HD. For only 370. I am pretty happy.