Looking for ultra cheap machine for Timemachine via AFP

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What do you think the slowest machine I could get away with installing Leopard on and using it to serve AFP. Also, would it be fast enough to "stream video" to the AppleTV ?

Rather then use an Airport Base Station, I could return that ... maybe spend a 100 more and buy the machine. (I already have a family pack for Leopard, so license isn't an issue)

(I am looking at sharing approx 2TB in external USB 2.0 drives, so it would also need to be able to handle that. I don't know much about older Macs)

 

[Yoursh]

Your best bet would be a slightly upgraded Powermac G4. Since your looking for something to be simply a AFP server you could get away with a slower processor. With a Powermac G4 you have the upgradeability and they can be had at a good price if you look around. I have leopard running on my 466Mhz Powermac by loading it via the Target disk mode method. It's slow, but the all the network settings run fine.

I would suggest getting one of the 867Mhz or faster models. They are the oldest models that leopard officially supports, so you don't have to mess with hacking your way around the istallation. Also they have gigabit ethernet which is nice for transfering larger files over a wired network. Then just throw in a USB 2.0 card(the older Powermacs only have 1.1 built in), and you should be good to go. You could also upgrade the internal hard drives to add more storage. Then just run the thing headless and run the thing via leopards screen sharing.