Originally Posted by
James3370
Well the Shuttle is 5+ years old, so all the technology has become scarce & components like ram & such are rediculosly expensive (compared to newer technology). Last I checked, upgrading the ram & video to make it Win7 compatable was gonna run in the ballpark of about $200-300. It has a good copy of XP on it & is more than adequate for a 10 year old to use for occasional web browsing, homework, etc.
I currently have
THIS D-Link NAS w/ the (2) 2tb drives RAID 1 (mirroring), but sometimes the latency when copying from it to either USB hard drive or watching movies from them is irritating. This is the main reason for doing this PC/data server combo so I have the throughput of just the mobo....that & the convenience/smaller overall footprint of having everything in one case
I don't really know your situation, but I put together a fairly capable media server using a Pentium 4 using just old extra components. The plus of this is i can set it and forget it. I use
Sick Beard to locate and manage all my tv show files,
Couch Potato to locate and download movies I want, and
SABnzbd to do the actual downloading (along with utorrent). It's pretty automatic. Plus I can also stream anything on the server to any device in the house. It might not work out for your particular set up, but it's an option.
Then again, it doesn't really look like you're looking for suggestions of any kind, just posting what you're doing, so I guess it doesn't matter.