[Geeba]

TCCTA,

It's still sat in pieces in my bedroom. I haven't decided whether to bother with this, as its not ideal, and may be better to buy a more dedicated case, and use an ion board to keep it low power, low heat.

Let me know how you get on.

One problem I found t2ffn was as the server became central to my home network I started using it for everything not just movie streaming.... it stored pictures and documents.. backups of PC, downloads, trans-coding etc.... and even thou I had disk replication on (which saved me in the end) I was still backing up very sensitive data on a PC I had rescued from a skip.... and the mainboard did fail! the I/O controller failed... in the end I bought a new mainboard and built a nice server in a coolermaster case racked out with fans to keep it cool and now have it bolted to the floor in my garage.... I feel alot safer now with my data.

Skippers are good if your only using them as test boxes or not to worried about stuff stored on them... IMO of course

[johnny]

Its a bit late, but I thought I'd share my experience.
I did a similar build into an old dell dimension 2400.

SATA wasn't a problem and I have 2* startech 4 port SATA PCI cards working really well (plus a PCI Gbit network card). PCI 33 means cards are only SATA1 speed but thats plenty for streaming movies.

Operating system caused major issues though.
I started out using an existing XP home installation with shares and then tried moving to various linux installs, which were initially promising but my (and I think your?) 845 chipset with built in intel graphics doesn't work well with the linux kernel (i.e. all flavours of linux are affected). (google linux intel 8xx 9xx graphics etc for further info.)

Basically the graphics kept crashing and took the network card down as well, and as theres nothing like rebooting in the middle of a movie to double your fun, I went back to xp home and shares until they fix the issue.

I guess this MAY affect your choice of unraid (which i think is linux based?)

For "backup" (OK, lets call it resilience rather than backup) I didn't have anything at all for ages, but the fear got to me and I now have 2* 1Tb drives mirrored as RAID 1 on one sata card for data that changes a lot, and 4* 1.5Tb drives for media (3 with actual data and one with parity updated nightly using flexraid, which is free and fantastic).

All of these drives plus the original IDE system drive run happily off the original dell PSU.

I recommend Flexraid highly for the fact that it deals well with drives which:
a) contain data already and
b) don't change much (i.e. media),
c) live under any operating system

After the initial (in my case 14 hour) parity calculation it updates quickly (e.g. after adding about 25GB of DVD ISO data the parity update lasts about 20 minutes)

Hope this helps and have fun

Added bit:
WRT Geebas comments: Reliability could be an issue, but my experiences with installing and configuring ubuntu (et al.) on my existing box have taught me that if something fundamental happens to the machine I could get new board and case, plug the drives in and have everything looking identical (on the network) in a few hours.
Reliability isn't just about the age of the machine, its about how quickly you could replicate and replace it when it goes wrong (whatever the age
Fundamental to that (I think) is disks which are resilient in some way (raid1 and flexraid for me) and readable anywhere (i.e. not reliant on any particular hardware configuration or OS).

[draws6741]

If heat is an issue get a liquid cooling system. They work great even on my multi ram and 12x processors. It runs amazingly cool.