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Planning to build a basic file server **Advice Please**

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nfinity

Member
Joined
Jul 8, 2012
I was looking for advice for both hardware and OS.

I currently have around 500GBs of movies, music, pictures, games and programs. The server would be mainly used to stream movies and music but there will be times when I’ll want to pull large and or many files from or too it. I hope to build a system which can saturate an entire 1 Gig LAN (theoretical 128mbps I believe). I have a WD red 3TB drive which should be able to push those speeds when working with larger file sizes. Plan to use a 1TB laptop hard to back up the main 3TB drive. Have no need to run RAID for the data drives. Those are the only 2 data drives i plan on having. Thinking I could have a script or the os backup the 3TB drive to the 1TB for redundancy.

Power efficiency is important to me as well. I hope to use a picoPSU. Thinking a Celeron 1037u or J800/j1900 would be ok? Power efficient yet enough performance to maximize a gigabyte network? Any other recommendations on hardware are welcome.

Next I’m contemplating the OS. I’m a windows user for my other machines and I would have to be able to see and maneuver through directories on the server from those windows machines. So thinking I’ll have to stink with NFS…. My knowledge is weak here. Assuming I could still go with a freeNAS or NAS4free? Any other recommended os’s for my situation and plan? I have only other OS I have worked with in the past is Linux(Ubuntu) other than apple. I don’t have much experience here on a good file server OS. Think Windows Home server would be too much or more than I need for such a low powered system as my plans advise…

Any advice on a recommend cpu and os would be greatly appreciated. Again I wish to saturate my gigabyte networking without using a power hungry server. Hope to build a system idling at 10-15 watts max if I’m lucky. Thanks ahead for your input!
 
Any mid-level cpu is fine (my server's still running an e7400 and has no issues serving movies to multiple clients and doing large file transfers at the same time). Personally...I use windows home server with stablebit drivepool. With 2 drives, drivepool will give you full redundancy so if 1 drive dies on you, you still won't lose anything.
 
Personally, I'd grab a Pentium G3258. Extremely affordable, easily overclockable. I wouldn't bother with FreeNAS (or any NAS variant), personally. If you're eager to learn, run a flavor of linux. Otherwise, setting up Windows as a server has a smaller learning curve. I don't have any experience with pico PSUs, but something in the 150W range ought to be plenty I would imagine. Personally, I'd stick a CX430 in there so you have options to expand in the future if you want.
 
Thank you both for the ideas. Still thinking on how exactly I want to do it. I have time. Maybe i will go with windows... idk, we will see. I may test both
 
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