Home Server/Home-Theatre PC -- Part 1
First Things FirstBefore one gets too far into developing, modifying, and using a system, one must plan for the creation and potential future upgrading. Hopefully, in this part of the series, I will be able to walk you through the planning portion of your build.
System Planning
In our situation right now, we have old computer parts lying around from previous builds and upgrades for other people. For the most part, we will be recycling these parts and using them for a server/home-theatre PC (HTPC). They may not be energy-efficient or top of the line components, but they will suffice for the uses that we currently have. For the planning portion, we wanted to build a server that would house all of our music, including our ripped CD’s. This will allow us to back up our CDs in the “unlikely” event that they become scratched. Surely you haven’t allowed that to happen before, have you? Additionally, we’d like to off-load as much of our digital media (podcasts, executable files, etc) as we can from our laptop. So, in essence, we’d like to be able to copy music from the server to the laptop to allow us to take music with us if/when we leave the house. Also, we’d free up space on our laptop and desktop. In the future, we’d like to hook up our cable signal through the server to the TV. This would allow us to set our computer up as a TiVo substitute as well as playback our DVD media. So, in the future, we’d need to plan for high-definition content and cable playback.
Component Layout
The above planning allows us to know what we want/have and what we’d like to upgrade at a later date. We have a case from a pretty old computer that I’ll be modifying to fit our needs. It’s approximately four or five years old and made out of heavy-duty steel. The problem is that it’s an ugly off-white color with a rippled texture on top of the steel. We’d like for it to look fairly unobtrusive next to our A/V equipment if and when we upgrade to a fully integrated HTPC. So, I will be sanding down the texturing; priming and spray painting the steel sides and top, as well as the plastic front, jet black; and seal-coating the paint with a high gloss enamel. An old motherboard and processor from a two and a half year old computer will provide the raw computing power of the server. While it is not a recent dual-core processor, the single-core chip will provide plenty of power for the time being. Later on, we can upgrade to a power-efficient dual core chip. With that motherboard/processor combo, I have a couple sticks of old DDR2 533 MHz speed memory to provide us with 1 GB of system memory – plenty for serving up media. Several old hard drives that I have accumulated over the years and repaired provide the storage space. The nice thing about these is that they are identical in every way – same manufacturer, capacity, and firmware (software used to communicate). I’ll explain later, but as I have three of these 80 GB hard drives, I plan on using RAID 0 to expand our total capacity to 240 GB, spanned over all three drives. But more on this later… Now to move on to how to choose technology should you not have enough computer parts lying around to construct somewhere between five and ten computers.
Computer Theory and Background
In computers, all things upgrade at a phenomenal rate. According to one rule, all technology, whether speed, capacity, or bandwidth, doubles every eighteen months. Just think about it – just recently, 1 Terabyte (1024 Gigabyte) hard drives were released to the public. In about a year, 2 TB (Terabyte) drives will be released in the size of one hard drive. Quad-core processors are currently on the market for purchase, however, according to this rule, we will be able to buy 8-core processors in about a year. So, how do you decide what to do about technology when it advances so quickly? The approach I have taken over the past six years or so that I have been building computers has been to set a plan for what I want my computer system to do, set a reasonable budget (realizing that I will most likely go over, thus adjusting it to reflect this). After I have adjusted my budget for this inevitable “oversight”, I sit down and do research to find out what technologies were released about four to six months ago, and find out which particular components faired the best. In this way, I still purchase recent technology, however, I bypass the first few months of incompatible software and buggy drivers. Usually, by the fourth month, Apple, Microsoft, and various collaborators for Linux have fixed whatever issues may have arisen and incorporated those solutions into the retail boxes we as consumers purchase. Therefore, when you buy that hard drive at your local office or computer supply store, you have a fully functioning piece of hardware – not one that you have to try to fix later on.
Proposed Series Outline
o – Address new or upgrade components
o – Discuss pros and cons of the various operating systems
o – Discuss the installation and planning of the architecture and components
o – Discuss the consideration of modding before assembling
o – Discuss actual assembly and connection of components
o – Discuss initial boot and configuring the BIOS
o – Discuss construction of RAID array using motherboard documentation
o – Discuss installation of the operating system
o – Discuss configuration of network and security tweaks
o – Discuss bundling of media for distribution
o – Discuss possible alternatives and provide information for tweaking the performance for them
o – Any other concerns or problems that you, as the audience, raise
Conclusion
That is a proposed schedule for what I will cover. If there is enough interest in any one particular area, or misunderstanding about one portion of the build, I will be more than happy to modify the outline above. As always, please feel free to ask any questions or leave any comments you wish. I have benefited greatly from people’s experience and teaching in the past, so it is my hope that I can help you all with computers in any way I can.
Labels: computer help, home file server, HTPC
posted by Herr Breiten @ 11:16
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