Building a home server for dummies

Anghammarad

Anghammarad

Feet of Clay
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Stockholm, Swe
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So I want to build a home server (or rather a NAS really) and use http://www.lime-technology.com/ in order to run http://www.plexapp.com/ and stream media to all my devices in the household.

I have acquired an old Dell tower (Optiplex GX400, ca 2001) from work for free but in order for it be able to transcode and stream 1080P video I will need to upgrade. Now I am a Mac user which obviously means that I have no clue whatsoever when it comes to motherboard upgrades and such. So my question is simply: Is it possible to just go out and buy an upgrade kit (motherboard, CPU, RAM, graphics card) and slam it into the tower (will it fit?) and if so will I, never having done this before, stand a reasonable chance of actually succeeding?
 
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With the Dell being from 2001, you will need to find out if the motherboard has a AGP slot or an PCI Express slot for the graphics card. AGP (Advanced/Accelerated Graphics Port) is the older technology than PCI Express (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express, abbreviated as PCIe).

With 1080p videos you generally would need a PCIe slot for the graphics card and check that the graphics card can run the HD resolutions required as you will have more choices than the AGP slots graphic cards.

But due to the year of the motherboard it is likely that it is AGP only slot for the graphics card. There are AGP only graphics cards out there that will play HD standard. However you now have to check whether the motherboard supports 8x or 4x AGP speeds. Apparently the higher one allows a faster clock speed which enables the graphic card to take all of the processing power of the video away from the processor.

But, this does matter on what the original processor is. It is likely to be a single core I am assuming, so you may, if you can, upgrade to a dual core that is quite a low clock (say, 2GHz?) and this should be ok to allow you to view HD video. Provided of course, everything I've mentioned above actually works and you actually are a lucky person to have all the required parts that will allow it to work in the first place! :-).


*Reading the above in more detail, if you are just stripping the insides out and replacing it, you should be able to upgrade it with anything you require, as the tower looks relatively large to fit any sized motherboard of your choice and processors and graphics cards (so long you don't go insane with the graphic cards)*
 
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Be aware that Dell uses custom motherboards too.
Btx i think, quite rare to find.

Tried to upgrade my XPS600, but it was nearly impossible so i bought a new one (custom built).

What is your budget for the upgrade??
 
Wait? Are you actually planning on watching 1080P from the GX400? I got the impression that you were purely using it for server duties? If not then ignore my next paragraph.

You don't need a Video Card for transcoding. You don't even really need a graphics output if it's purely a server. However, that GX400 is only a Pentium 4 at best, so I'm doubtful if it has the power to transcode 1080P. If you're planning on buying a new motherboard/cpu/ram/graphics card anyway, you might as well just throw away that P4 junk, and either A) buy add a PSU, Case and you've got a new server or B) Just invest in a consumer NAS Device (QNAP is my personal recommendation).

Now, what are you planning playing the (streamed) 1080P media on PCs? PS3? Macs? Depending on your network, you most likely don't even need to transcode, personally I just have a media server/HTPC, which all other devices just connect to and map SMB shares, if you've got 100Mbs wired or half decent wireless N you should be able to just stream 1080P natively. Obviously if you to stream to a PS3 then you may have to transcode. But if you can handle just flat-out sharing the real limits are on your network and HDD speed, so the GX400 would be fine.

The operating system you choose will really decide what you can do and how you do it. Looking at that Lime-Technology OS, I couldn't see where it supported transcoding (though maybe I missed it), so you may struggle to get a solution on there. If you choose a Windows System (XP onwards, Server 2003 onwards) or a Linux system (Insert favorite Linux build here), you'll likely have a much easier time. Most QNAPs also support TVersity plug-ins which I believe will also Transcode.
 
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My intention was to rip out more or less eveything in it and replace it. New motherboard, new processor, new graphics card and so on. Obviously it doesn't have to be high end, I've found AMD upgrade kits for the equivalent of $300 ( http://www.komplett.se/k/ki.aspx?sku=604570 sorry it's in swedish) A consumer four bay NAS, even without any disks are going to cost much more than that. I'm planning to use unRAID which is based on Slackware.

I'm going to stream to computers (Mac), iPad, Iphone, Android phones and Apple TV and to do that I need to transcode with the media solution I'm using right now (Plex).
 
If you're replacing the whole lot, why use that shell? You can get a half decent chassis for as little as £25 over here. If you are shelling out for a new mobo, cpu, ram etc, why not just get a case too?

Also, you said server (or NAS). They're two different things. If you want to be able to stream media to different devices, I'm with Casio in getting a NAS. I have a Netgear Stora at home and it flawlessly streams music, movies, show etc to any of the devices in my house. I can even play the music on my iPhone. Now if only I could figure out a way of getting it to play AVIs!!
 
The plan is to start out using it more or less as a NAS but it might be used as a server in the future. The thing is that Plex Media Server is central in my setup, I need something that handle Plex and the functionality it brings. This means that while a Netgear NAS is fine for storing and distributing the data it is simply not powerful enough to do the things I want, namely on the fly transcoding of 1080P media and stream it to an iPad or iPhone. Read more here http://wiki.plexapp.com/index.php/PlexNine_PMS_Overview.

I was thinking of using the Dell for two reasons: It doesn't cost anything and it has ample space for diskdrives.
 
It is free. Please note that the Mac version of the server is still in Beta and the Windows and Linux versions are barely out of Alpha. It is good though, it was originally forked from XBMC to make it more Mac focused but they have diversified.
 
For anyone considering doing something similar, I'd point out that a NAS will draw a lot less power than a desktop PC. I have a Synology DS211j that draws 25 watts when the drives are active (ie, moving the heads around) and 10 watts when idle. A PC is going to use an order of magnitude more power.
 

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