building a linux media server - Need advice on configuration

[3p4145]

hello,
I am planning to have a small system as a always-on media server at home..
What I am planning to do is have a linux distro on a old netbook, install a few programms and scripts that will serve uPNP media, run transmission for torrents and use one of the USB ports for a HDD for NAS and run a proxy server and SSH tunnel.

So the question I have is.. is it better to install the OS on flash drive and use the built in HDD as a NAS drive? the reason i am asking is.. if the server is going to be always on.. wouldnt this kill my built in HDD? With transmission serving and downloading and checking, SSH taking in traffic, uPNP inotifying... the HDD would be constantly spinning right?

So insted if I boot the system from a flash and keep a copy of the flash.. worse case, when the flash dies.. I just use a new one.. 4-8GB flash drives are pretty cheap these days...

Any suggestions? is this even possible? Do I need to not worry about my built in HDD constantly spinning?

 

[wmorri]

Hi,

Here is the first thing that you have to think about, you are going to be running this on a netbook. before I would even worry about your hdd I would think about the heat and how you are going to be getting ride of it. For a test, run your laptop doing one thing all night or for 24 hours. Then see what type of heat you are getting.

What I am getting at is that a netbook is a bad platform to try and do this on. Unless you can keep it cool enough so that it won't shut itself down.

 

[root]

To be honest, so long as you don't hide the old laptop under the sofa I don't think that heat is going to be an issue.

Constant disk activity can be a pain, especially if the machine is always on, this depends greatly on where the media server will live. -a flash drive will be silent.

but in my opinion, that's the only difference that you're going to notice between them, the flash drive will be quieter, other than that there will likely be no difference in performance or lifetime of the disk.

if you go with a flash drive, you may want to disable disk swapping on a Flash drive.