Turn Inspiron 530 (Desktop) into server

Is it possible to take my old Insipiron 530 desktop, and turn it into a server?

If so, what kind of hardware do I need, and what are the recommended specs for streaming video, and copying 1-25GB files? I want specs, not products please.

The Inspiron 530 is a good starting point for a home server. More powerful, actually in terms of processor and ram than pre-made home servers [like HP's MediaSmart for example].

I am going to assume you will be streaming HD video. The most vital pieces would be storage space and your NIC. whatever's onboard in that tower may do alright but I would want to go gigabit via pci-e, personally.

An hour of 1080p video is roughly 2-4GB based on the encoding. My copy of Transformers in 1080P is 7GB with 5.1 AC3 audio at 2 hours 23 minutes. I usually take that as an extreme when I calculate how many hours I can store. So for this purpose I figure 50mb per minute or 6.25mb per second including audio.

I would go with at least 1TB for storage and a 2nd drive of a smaller size for the operating system. OR two 1TB in a mirrored raid.

Again, I stress gigabit ethernet if it is possible for the rest of your setup because of the wider throughput capability for streaming.

When streaming a video from a source over the network, unless the source is transcoding it for the recipient, you don't really need to worry about the processor's performance. When I am streaming my movies from my laptop to my console, they don't need to be transcoded so the console can just play them as if they were stored locally on it.

10/100 vs 10/100/1000

The on-paper max of gigabit is 990mbps. Cut that by 8 and you get 124MB per second max of pipe to play with. With megabit (10/100) you have (100mbps / 8) - ~10% overhead for a total of 11mb of pipe. In my experiences, I have be able to transfer at roughly 7-8MB per second on my 10/100 network here where I live. So if you plan on multitasking with that server, gigabit wins.

In regards to ram, 2-4GB is sufficient. It's DDR2 is so cheap you might as well max it out.

It's late and I feel I've jumbled around a lot with my information, but I hope I've given you a starting point.

If you have more questions, please ask!

Thanks!

Yea so far I planned on getting a 1x PCIe 10/100/1000 LAN card, and replaced the hard drive thats in it, with 1 TB 7200 RPM HDD for norton ghost, and 2 1.5TB seagates for movies and whatever else we want.

And am i correct in saying that I need to buy a server CPU to replace my old one? If so is this a good one? Newegg.com - Intel Xeon E3110 Wolfdale 3.0GHz 6MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor

cclloyd9785 said:

Yea so far I planned on getting a 1x PCIe 10/100/1000 LAN card, and replaced the hard drive thats in it, with 1 TB 7200 RPM HDD for norton ghost, and 2 1.5TB seagates for movies and whatever else we want.

And am i correct in saying that I need to buy a server CPU to replace my old one? If so is this a good one? Newegg.com - Intel Xeon E3110 Wolfdale 3.0GHz 6MB L2 Cache LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor

You can if you feel so compelled to. The Xeons are beastly in comparison the the Pentium E2220 that's in your machine now and will DEFINITELY give you a crazy-ass leg up in terms of the server's ability to handle requests from client machines.

But, unless you plan on running a web server off of it as well [Apache, PHP, MySQL, etc, etc] You may not need it. I would give it a run like you have it now and see if it's performing fast enough before you add it in.

Ok and one more question. I went on Microsoft.com, and when I went to buy Windows Home Server, on newegg.com there was only a x32 option. Is the 3.25GB of RAM enough?

And my last question. Can I use it to either install Norton Ghost on it, or tell Norton Ghost to back up to it?

cclloyd9785 said:

Ok and one more question. I went on Microsoft.com, and when I went to buy Windows Home Server, on newegg.com there was only a x32 option. Is the 3.25GB of RAM enough?

And my last question. Can I use it to either install Norton Ghost on it, or tell Norton Ghost to back up to it?

Yes and Yes.

You should be fine with 3.25 gb of ram. There is also a version of WHS in the works [now in public beta, I believe] that is has a 64-bit flavor. Wanna Peek at the Next Version of Windows Home Server? Check out the new public beta for Windows Home Server, Code Name ?Vail? - Windows Home Server Blog - The Windows Blog

You cannot install Ghost ON the current version of WHS [upcoming I am uncertain of] but you can install it on your client machines and have it back up to the server.

If you didn't want to install ghost ON the clients you can use just the disc and create an image to send to the WHS provided you use Ghost to create custom Symantec Recvoery Disc with the lan drivers for the computer in question.

Make sense? I have a hangover so I apologize if it doesn't.

Ok that is good enough. As long as I can put the backups on the server and restore from it.

Ok. So it runs fast for you. But all the computers in my house will be using 802.11b/g wifi, or 10/100 LAN. Will it still run as fast as yours with only a 2 GHz 2 core CPU, and half the memory?

cclloyd9785 said:

Ok. So it runs fast for you. But all the computers in my house will be using 802.11b/g wifi, or 10/100 LAN. Will it still run as fast as yours with only a 2 GHz 2 core CPU, and half the memory?

I think you'll be fine. In your case, I would probably stagger the ghost backups on different days [like mon,tues,wed,etc] but still on a pattern since you only have 10/100 lan and b/g wifi so your network does not get congested too often. If you made the switch to gigabit you could probably do them all at once.

What Acruasd has is a tower straight off the shelf [even down to the ram; the 8GB Samsung chips come standard in the p6140f for $699 USD I believe]

I did a large transfer via 10/100 a while back of around 60gb and I remember it taking somewhere in the ballpark of a couple hours. Remember this is just MY experience, yours might be better.