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

 

Add:
I'd just pony up for an Intel 2600K i7. A Sandy-Bridge i7 w. SATA III will bulletproof your system for years.

Remove:
Blu-Ray recorder - cost per disc & limited capabilities kill this. It's just not worth it.

WD 1TB C: drive - go SSD. With the cost of 1TB drives due to the flooding, you can get an SATAIII 60GB for about the same price. The HDD is the choke spot for all computers. 7200RPM, 10,000RPM ... disks are a dated technology, go SSD and boot to Windows in 7 seconds

CPU
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819115070

Board
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813131790

SSD
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820233193

 

1. i've never been a fan of intel, so i went amd. if i was building a gaming rig, i probably would've gone intel, but i'm not so i didn't LOL

2. the bluray will be used for backing up larger files of older stuff that i want to keep but don't use very frequently....& a way to rent & rip blurays :rick:

3. apprantly reading ownz you like k3ifers cause -

"* OCZ 60gb Solid State Drive...this will be OS & main programs only. I could've gotten a bigger one, but I found a hell of a deal on this one, so there ya go"
&
"* (1) Western Digital 1tb Hard Drive...this will be the "data drive" for the OS & where i load non-bootup/rarely used programs"



the 1tb data drive will also be where torrents are downloaded to until i get a chance to go thru them & add to the RAID drive backups of all the movies & tv shows etc

 

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.

 

need typical heywoodja pose with wife to add to collage.

 

so i forgot to pay for my domain and i can't find the gif on my computer :wtc:

i wonder if she's in it :rick:

 

i have an older pic.....

don't think so

 

yeah this was mainly built as a newer pc for just basic internet, email, data storage & watching movies/tv shows i have either ripped or downloaded. not a gamer, so never intended it to be top of the line, but once i got started, i decided i wanted to incorporate the NAS RAID i had externally inside the same pc case to save room etc

 

Drew!
You would use the SATA III Hard Drive in conjunction with your regular hard drive right?

 

I'm doing it now : o

I'm on an i7 Sandy Bridge 17in laptop. The primary C: drive is a 120GB Intel SATA III. The D: drive (used for storage) is whatevs*.

*the laptop shipped with a 640GB 7200RPM HDD, I moved it to the D: slot when I upgraded the C: ... then I upgraded the D: with another SSD. : o


My desktop (older Intel Quad) has a 120GB OCZ SATAII SSD. No secondary drives on it. I have one of these:
http://www.amazon.com/Antec-EASYSATA.../dp/B00292BT8O

No fancy RAID. Just a bunch of dedicated (mp3, images, tv shows, movies, 360 games, etc) 1 & 2 TB drives for storage. Plug and play. Use as needed. No constant power to the drives too.