Help with a home server

[estaswick]

I work with a group of folks in my apartment building doing video and motion graphics work. From any given shoot we may have 40-100 GB of data. We have been jumping back and forth on HDD/flash drives between different workstations but I would like to set up a server where we can access footage and back-up files. I am fairly comp. with building computers but the server idea is new territory for me. Because of the buildings configuration we would need wireless access to the data(I realize this will prbly be the bottle neck but this storage would be for back-up and transfer, we would move the content local to edit).

My thought was to take an old tower with an asus a8n-e and an athlon x64 chip I all ready have.however this would require a raid card. So now I wonder if I'm not better off buying a cheap barebones with a MOBO that supports RAID 5. Is it better to get a new set-up? If so how cheaply could I do it for. Are there better NAS options? All I need is something that can sit in the back room,, hooked up to a wireless router, and allow access from multiple computers. Hoping for about 6TB storage after raid (4x2TB or 5x1.5TB)

 

[hang-the-9]

I would really really really not suggest you copy 40+ gig files over wireless. Even at N speeds it will take hours. I guess if you don't have a choice, you don't, but try to get wires to the computers.

If you access the server one user at a time, your current tower with 2-4 gig of RAM and a RAID card with drives will be just fine. There are also plenty of dedicated NAS systems out there, all depends on what you can spend really. Don't know if they will be "better" but will be setup out of the box for use, with maybe some network configurations needed. Even with several users, your system should be OK with a RAID setup and new drives, but then you'd want 4 gig of RAM minimum, unless you have a 64bit OS to install on it, 4 gig is all you can add anyway.

Your first thing to work out though is how and where it will be setup, then figure out what you will use. Keep in mind that wireless speeds will never be the advertized maximum, plan on getting 1/2 or less of that, especially if there are walls or floors in between the devices. You're looking at speeds like this: "13MB/s through one wall with laptop 5 metres away, 6MB/s through 3-4 walls about 10-15 metres away."