Hey everyone. Long time lurker, first time poster.
So I've been using XMBC for about 3 months now. I started off with Openelec on a Raspberry Pi which worked out ok for me for about a month, but then I just couldn't handle how slow it was (256 MB model Pi) so I took one of my old laptops - a Dell XPS 17, formatted it and threw windows 7 and XBMC on it which is connected through HDMI to my home theater receiver and 52" TV. Unfortunately it only has a 320 GB drive so I've resorted to using an external eSATA 1TB drive to hold everything. Now I'm faced with running out of drive space and I'd like to get away from having the laptop doing all the downloading, ripping, and storage all while acting as the HTPC as well.
I've come across a great situation where I have been given an older Dell Poweredge 2950 III with dual Xeon Quad Core X5450's, 24 GB of ram and 6 X 146GB 10K SAS drives. So I figure I'll use this for all the downloading, ripping and of course some storage, and an older PC that has 6 SATA ports on it as a NAS server using FreeNAS. I could easily write a scrips (of download one) that moves all files from a certain directory on the PE 2950 to the NAS server, and I'll stream everything to the XPS 17 connected to the HTS. I Fugger the dual Xeons will be excellent for ripping and encoding as it has a ton of processing power, and a NAS server running FreeNAS with 6 2 TB or 6 3 TB drives will be plenty of space for the future.
Any thoughts on weather this is a good idea? I would like to have one machine dedicated to ripping and downloading and other miscellaneous HTPC related tasks, one for storage and one for the HTPC itself. I could easily build one system to do everything but that would cost a few $$$$ and I currently have all the above equipment available (except the drives for the NAS server.
So I've been using XMBC for about 3 months now. I started off with Openelec on a Raspberry Pi which worked out ok for me for about a month, but then I just couldn't handle how slow it was (256 MB model Pi) so I took one of my old laptops - a Dell XPS 17, formatted it and threw windows 7 and XBMC on it which is connected through HDMI to my home theater receiver and 52" TV. Unfortunately it only has a 320 GB drive so I've resorted to using an external eSATA 1TB drive to hold everything. Now I'm faced with running out of drive space and I'd like to get away from having the laptop doing all the downloading, ripping, and storage all while acting as the HTPC as well.
I've come across a great situation where I have been given an older Dell Poweredge 2950 III with dual Xeon Quad Core X5450's, 24 GB of ram and 6 X 146GB 10K SAS drives. So I figure I'll use this for all the downloading, ripping and of course some storage, and an older PC that has 6 SATA ports on it as a NAS server using FreeNAS. I could easily write a scrips (of download one) that moves all files from a certain directory on the PE 2950 to the NAS server, and I'll stream everything to the XPS 17 connected to the HTS. I Fugger the dual Xeons will be excellent for ripping and encoding as it has a ton of processing power, and a NAS server running FreeNAS with 6 2 TB or 6 3 TB drives will be plenty of space for the future.
Any thoughts on weather this is a good idea? I would like to have one machine dedicated to ripping and downloading and other miscellaneous HTPC related tasks, one for storage and one for the HTPC itself. I could easily build one system to do everything but that would cost a few $$$$ and I currently have all the above equipment available (except the drives for the NAS server.