Question about home sever hardware

[jrs6494]

I am wanting to create a home server so my computer and my wife's has a centrally location for music and pictures plus backup.

I am trying to decide if I should just buy a used 5 year old PC or buy newer parts? Someone has a 5 year old dell they will sell me for $50. I am afraid I would need to upgrade the case for more drive bays.

Thing is I already have an unused CPU and would need to buy case, motherboard, ram and power supply and could get all for about $100. Nothing fancy but just enough to get the jib done.

So buy the old PC or new?

Thanks

 

[Indigo]

it also depends on which OS you want to use. I'm a huge fan of Windows Home Server not only for it's ability to back up the other PCs in the house, but it also has a fairly robust sharing system in place for sharing such files. You can take it a step further with something like Subsonic (LOVELOVELOVE that software) to make it possible to share out the files even further.

That being said, I've got Windows Home Server (first edition) running on a pokey dual core 1.9 GHz with 4GB of RAM and two 1TB hard drives in it, and it backs up all the computers in the house (currently 7).

If you just want something to dump files on and forget that they're there until you need them again, in all honesty, anything within the past 8 years will probably do it, just don't ask it to do more advanced things (such as Subsonic, media center, etc)