{"id":35,"date":"2009-09-19T20:39:03","date_gmt":"2009-09-19T20:39:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/?p=35"},"modified":"2014-11-13T11:24:59","modified_gmt":"2014-11-13T19:24:59","slug":"media-file-server-old","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/retired-equipment\/media-file-server-old\/","title":{"rendered":"Media File Server (old)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Since the heart of my home theater is my HTPC<\/a> I decided to build myself a media file server. There are quite a few benefits to having a file server. I can get the noisy hard drives out of my HTPC which makes my theater quieter, having the hard drives out of the HTPC also keeps the HTPC cooler, I have a RAID 5 setup in my server so I have redundancy which gives me some data security, I can access the server from any of the computers in my house allowing me to share all my files among all my computers and it was fun project too.<\/p>\n

I built my media file server out of an old Gateway computer that I had lying around. The specs are definitely nothing to write home about, it’s a PIII 500mhz with 328 megs of ram. I have a 3ware Escalade 7500-LP four port RAID card installed in the server. I have four Western Digital 200GB hard drives connected to the 3ware card in a RAID 5 configuration. This gives me 600GB of storage in total. If you are unfamiliar with RAID setups you may be wondering why I don’t have 800GB of storage. This is where redundancy comes into play. Explaining how RAID works is rather complicated and beyond the scope of this page; if you want to learn more about RAIDs click here<\/a>. Essentially with a RAID 5 setup if one of my hard drives should fail I can replace it with a new one and not lose any of my data; pretty cool huh? With the amount of data that I have the sense of security of having a RAID setup is very reassuring. When you have about ~20,000 mp3s (130 gigs worth) and growing archive of TV shows (currently around 200GB) it is nice knowing that I have some security with my data should a hard drive happen to fail (and they always do eventually).<\/p>\n

My original plan was to run Linux on my server. Linux was something that I’ve been wanting to try out for awhile and I have a good friend who swears by it. I hate to admit this but Linux defeated me. I tried for an entire weekend to get it setup but I just couldn’t figure it out; the main problem being getting it to recognize my RAID card. I ended up getting very frustrated and just gave up and installed Windows 2000. I guess I am just a Windows guy at heart, I had the server up and running under Windows in a matter of hours and never really hit any road blocks along the way. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>I built the server in an Antec Solution Series Super Mid Tower case. I am a huge fan of Antec cases (my everyday computer is in an Antec Sonata case) and this case fit my needs perfectly. It comes with one 120mm case fan and I have added an additional 120mm fan as well. I am a believer in 120mm fans, they move a lot of air yet they are also quiet. The case also can hold five hard drives which is exactly how many I needed; four for the RAID 5 and one for the operating system. Antec has a clever way of mounting their drives as well, they attach with rubber grommets which also helps keep the noise down. If you are looking for a nice fairly inexpensive case I highly recommend it. <\/p>\n

I have done some other fun stuff with my server. I have setup an FTP server so that I can share some of my files with friends and family. This comes in really handy when I record a TV show for someone, they can just log on to my FTP server and download it from me. I have also setup web server (apache) on my server so I can run a website from it as well. I have setup a website already, it is kind of my dumping ground for misc. stuff that I don’t want on the server that hosts this website. I love having the web server, all I have to do is save a file in to the website folder and it is instantly live on the net, no longer do I have to upload via FTP. This comes in very handy when I am chatting with someone and I want to either give them a file or show them or picture of something, I just drag the file to the website folder and it is instantly available for them to download, very cool!<\/p>\n

Overall I am very glad that I built the server. It has given me some security with all my data, I had a lot of fun building it, and I love having everything in a central location that I can access from any of the computers in the house.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Since the heart of my home theater is my HTPC I decided to build myself a media file server. There are quite a few benefits to having a file server. I can get the noisy hard drives out of my HTPC which makes my theater quieter, having the hard drives out of the HTPC also […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-retired-equipment"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pE8l7-z","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":465,"href":"https:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35\/revisions\/465"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/moesrealm.com\/home-theater\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}