Atom 1.6 GHz dual core suitable for home media server

sirhawkeye64

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May 28, 2015
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I have an older Zotac ION (Intel Atom N330 1.6 GHz dual core) board that's sitting around that I was going to turn into a home (media/file) server for myself. This board has 4 GB of RAM and has SATA 3.0 Gbps ports. Wondering if this will be suitable? The server will ONLY be used for serving data, not transcoding or anything like that. I will probably just set it up as a network share to my other systems (so I'm NOT planning on using any Media Streaming softare like Plex, at the moment).

The storage drives are connected to a SATA 3.0Gbps interface (this is an older motherboard, about 4 years old) but I don't anticipate this will bottleneck the system. It will be connected to the wireless router via a wired gigabit ethernet.

Or, since my router (Nighthawk R7000) has a USB 3.0 port, would I be better off using a USB 3.0 hard drive connected directly to the router?