[IssacBinary]

Normally I don't post questions but I after reading for quite a while I still cant seem to come to a clear conclusion on what to do. So hopefully someone here could help me out.

So heres what im trying to do.

Theres 4 PCs and a laptop in our house, and one PC is the parents, its pretty old but all they use it for is Internet, eMail, Office, Photos and simple tasks like that, also ripping music for their Zune aswell. Its also on pretty much all day and off at night. Its an old HP desktop, big and loud and old.

We have 100s of CDs in the house and they never get used as its all away and forgot about almost, I told them about Squeezeboxs and thats what we are going to get. So we can easily access the music and move the CDs out of sight.

But my Dad has an aversion to using the "office" pc for new things like this, installing squeeze center and keeping music on it. So I was looking in to building a small Atom server just to host the music on, it would be ripped on the office pc and saved on the server using mounted network drives on the Atom server.


But then they also said they want to get a new PC as their one is old loud bla bla bla. So I thought perfect thing for them...one of the new Atoms, a Nettop.

So then I thought what about just getting one Atom get a couple of hard drives and a mini server / NAS case. So it will be a normal desktop computer and have storage for the music and have squeeze server on it. As it on all the time its fine. And for the times where the computer is off I can just set it so it will wake on lan, if the squeezebox is trying to access it.

The second part of all this is that when ever we watch films etc I always plug in the laptop to our TV to play rips, for youtube etc.

I have been planing for a while now to get an Atom nettop for a HTPC, (probably the Astock Ion 330BD).

SO NOW I thought.

Could I use the office pc to store my rips on aswell and then have XBMC or whatever stream the files over the network and play.

....

So what im wondering is. If I have an Atom HTPC would having an Atom nettop be good enough to be used as an Office PC, run squeezeserver and store 720p movie files and stream to the HTPC?

I dont think any transcoding will need to be done as all the files that will be stored on the server will be playable on the HTPC anyway so its not like the server needs to process the video first.

So all in all, is this an ok plan? What kind of specs am I looking for? or just Dual Core atom, 2GB+ and a couple of TB green hard drives.

the server would need to be small and quite and low power. Im planning on installing windows 7 on the server / office box, and probably xbmc live on the HTPC box but this is mainly about the server / office box.

..and no I cant have 1 pc and have them use the pc on the TV haha.

[thethirdnut]

To be honest for the server / new PC I'd recommend an i3-5x0 series CPU + mobo -OR- something similar someone else can recommend from the AMD side of the fence.

I started with an atom330 mini-ATX solution for my home server / NAS and shortly thereafter moved to an i3-540 mini-ATX http://www.silentpcreview.com/asus-p7h55d-m

Reasons are:
a) there are very few atom330 mobos that give a lot of expansion options...I did start with an ECS atom330 mobo that did have 4 x slots -HOWEVER- the chipset offers very little flexibility for advanced IRQ options, etc that come in handy when piling in a bunch of extra hardware.
b) the i3-5x0 CPU / mobo combo are also very power efficient like the atom330 -BUT- they are at least 2x more powerful plus also give more expansion, tweaking options.

My fully loaded atom330 rig used approx 80 W idle. The i3-540 solution with 2 more HDDs uses approx 110 W idle and its 2-4x as powerful to boot.

The atom330 didn't go to waste. I put a GT 240 into and now its the current HTPC I am using.

My $0.02

[IssacBinary]

hey thanks for the reply.

So its mainly due to lack of expansion? Because since the pc wont be needed for anything heavy duty and just as an office PC its not really going to be upgraded.

What im not sure about is this transcoding thing. Would the server only need to transcode is the destination isnt able to natively play that format?...and if it is able to play it does that mean the requirements to stream 720p video reduced?

What about price difference of the 2 systems?

[thethirdnut]

As far as expansion goes if you're going to make this a long-term NAS having the ability to add in SATA cards to grow number of HDDs in the server will help.

With ECS atom330 mobo I had there was an IRQ conflict between one of the PCIe slots and where I wanted to use the 2nd SATA expansion slot. This mobo didn't have option to reassign IRQs and none of the other atom mobos I looked at had this type of option either...a product of the chipset I believe.

Couldnt easily fix this with OS boot options either.

The H55 chipset and mobos on the otherhand have boatloads of config options, more expansion possibilities, etc.

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Cost differential is mainly cost of the CPU since atom330 mobo obviously has this included. H55 will also likely be a bit more expensive.

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As far as transcoding goes...the i3-5x0 should be able to handle it with ease via Twonky or Tversity or whatever you'd use that for.

[poofyhairguy]

What I don't like about this plan is the concept of a Nettop as an office PC. Yeah Atoms are great low power systems, but lets not get carried away. Even a dual core Atom is worse for most desktop tasks then a 3GHz Pentium 4! You go that route and the gripe will go from "the computer is too loud" to "the computer is too slow!" Remember, XP is dead.

Second thing I don't like is the concept of trying the folk's desktop computer to media server. Then you have to explain the whole "unless it is on-not asleep!- and working your HTPC won't work." Blah to that.

If say leave their desktop alone. If they are complaining about its noise make it another project to build them a new decent one with something like a Tri core AMD down the line.

For now get an ION HTPC and hang some USB 2TB drives off it, leave it on all the time, and let it be your squeezebox server. A dual core ION system can do that an playback 1080p easily...

[IssacBinary]

Ok, so ive ditched the idea of using the Atom as an office PC.

In regards to using the office PC as the server aswell, there isnt much concern there. 1) its on all the time anyway 2) its not going to get in the way of their stuff, it wont look any different to them apart from a few folders being on share mode basically.

The only reason its "turned off" is because its loud when my mum goes to bed! ha. But I was thinking of setting it so its timed or something so that at night it turns off / is set to wake from lan or something?

The specs needed for this sort of set up I have no idea about and cant seem to find anything.

For a file servering server is much specs needed? And again I dont know anything about this transcoding I keep reading about, when its needed etc.

Also is pure GHz just needed? As I see difference CPUs all the same but different.

i3, core 2 duo, AMD stuff, they have same GHz but would they all be ok for this job? Im just getting so stuck here! haha but if I could find out what the minimalism requirements are then I should be good.

[poofyhairguy]

But I was thinking of setting it so its timed or something so that at night it turns off / is set to wake from lan or something?

Any plan that involves turning off (or sleeping) the machine makes me nervous. Wake from LAN outright sucks for these sorts of purposes.

Basically it comes down to this:

Your parents have NO CLUE what you are really trying to do. They can't fix or troubleshoot the system. All they can do is enjoy it when it works.

That means for your purposes success will come when you have the least amount of things that "could go wrong." Because if things can go wrong they will, and they your parents will complain about how this setup you made for them is always broken. Been there, done that.

My focus would be on making a quiet enough desktop that it doesn't need to turn off at night for her to sleep. That means ALL 120mm or greater fans (even in the CPU heat sink). So lets forget the CPU for now and focus on the case.

I recommend one of these:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...-_-Product

It has speed controlled 120mm fans (so it can be set to be VERY quiet) but it also has space for 6 HDs. I use one for one of my media servers.

Then once you have that case, get this heat sink:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.as...-_-Product

I have 3, all very quiet.

Now that you have parts your mom can sleep with (lol), time to look at mobos, CPUs. I recommend this combo:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealD...mbo.547295

Tri-Core is what I am recommending for normal people desktops this year, and that mobo has a powerful enough GPU to not need a (noisy) discrete GPU. As a bonus that is a OEM processor so you won't pay for a noisy AMD heatsink you won't use.

Any desktop DDR3 is fine, I would shoot for 4GB. Put it all together and you have a desktop that can easily double as a server for pretty cheap (if you can buy now and get the current deals on the case/CPU combo). If you really want them to be impressed with their new desktop, get a SSD as the OS drive and it will literally feel ten times faster than their old machine. I would rather a SSD than a more powerful GPU/CPU- that combo is perfect...

I am sure you have more questions, keep asking!