Best setup for a simple home server?

[Leeter]

Hi!

First of all, I wanna say I'm new here, so take it easy with me

Now, I want to set up a home server to do the following for me:

* Act as a "media library" for my entire household, ie holding all movies, music, images and stuff and being able to stream it to our 2 laptops and my Xbox (with XBMC on it)
* Preferable be able to be built from older computer parts, so that it won't cost me too much.

Any ideas what I need? Any suggestions on Operating Systems? I know how to use Ubuntu Linux, but don't send me down any "terminal based" stuff because I'll get lost!

Thanks in advance guys!

 

[Hefemeister]

What old parts do you have as requirements for a home server are not very stringent.

I use an old socket 939 setup for mine running xp and file sharing.

A linux based OS would probably be best but I am not the one to answer that question.

The most expensive part of the build will be your hard drives.

 

[Leeter]

How do you have WinXP set up? I have a few old activation codes for XP lying around, so I could use Windows if need-be. Is it just a file-share (SAMBA) of all the relevant folders?

Do you have any automated systems for moving media to the home server?

Might I be bold and ask what you use your home server for in addition to the above? I learned that you can have it be useful for more, but I feel a little noobish at all of this.

 

[kmote]

Just a quick note to say that talking about illegal torrents is not allowed here. Talking about torrents in general like you have or referring specifically to legal torrents is OK.
A few questions first: How much data? What level of fault tolerance do you need? What is your budget? Using old parts in something like this is a good idea but what specifically do you have available?

 

[Leeter]

Weird double-post, will use this to answer the above.

Yeah, the torrents I download are all legal, set up by a few guys doing podcasts and vidcasts on a regular basis.

I have a 2.66 GHz P4 with 512 GB RAM, 80 GB HD which I recently got from a friend for free (an old Dell computer) which I could use. I'm considering putting in a new 320 GB HD (these can be pretty cheap) to expand space on it.

I'd say we have about 15 GB of pictures (wife has a digital camera, do I need to say more?), I need about 50 GB for downloads (but this is regularly purged and not permanent storage) and approx 20GB of music.

I got a 10 Mbit/s fibre-LAN at my house, and I'd guess I take down about 3-5GB per day in total. Why?

 

[Leeter]

No suggestions?

 

[kmote]

Sorry, normally responses would flag up but in this case I saw the weird double post thing so I didn't realise you had made an edit. If you are sticking with the original Dell case I assume there isn't much space for additional HDDs. Also, while the power of the PC is more than enough for what you need, being the age it is means it won't have an onboard SATA controller so make sure to either get an IDE drive or a SATA controller card (I've found this to be the cheaper option most of the time).

I would boot linux from a smallish partition on the 320GB and have a software RAID 1 between an 80GB partition on the 320 and the 80GB HDD. Have the RAID mounted somewhere for all your important docs/pics/files and use the rest of the space for less important stuffs.

 

[Leeter]

Awesome, so I'll go with a Linux OS, use that as a basis for my home server and see if I can RAID the new HDD.

Any suggestions on what kind of Linux OS to use as the basis for a Home Server?