Hands on: Build your own media server

If you have a growing collection of digital music, photos and videos, a Media Server can help you make the most of them. In this column, we’ll show you how to build your own.

The key to any successful project is first thinking carefully about what you want to achieve. This is especially crucial for any media server project because they can vary considerably in their capabilities, depending on your requirements.

If you just want basic file-serving, perhaps with the extra security of Raid, then you could get away with something as simple as a network-attached storage (Nas) device. If, however, you’d like to record TV shows or stream content to appliances that require certain software services running, you’ll almost certainly need a Windows PC. Then if that PC were also doubling-up as an entertainment PC in your front room, you’d want it to be as quiet and good looking as possible.

We've already covered a number of options and scenarios you should consider when building a media server. Here we’ll put together a working example. The particular configuration described here suits my own personal requirements, but the choices made are applicable to other systems and the end result is a flexible media server which will be ideal for many people.

Requirements
During the early planning stages I decided my own media server would do more than just store and serve files. It would also record TV shows and support a number of streaming appliances. Like most servers, though, it would need plenty of storage capacity and include some degree of redundancy to protect the data.

Recording TV shows and supporting a broad range of streaming appliances ruled out a simple Nas, so I was looking at equipping a PC for the task. It would also need to access a decent electronic programming guide (EPG) for scheduling recordings, and streaming clients would include an Xbox 360 games console.

My budget couldn’t afford the luxury of a dedicated PC running by itself, so the media server would also need to double up as my main entertainment PC in the living room. It therefore ideally needed to be as discreet as possible. With these basic requirements in place, I could go about finalising the specification.

Core specification
The processor, memory and motherboard requirements for a media server can be quite modest and are dictated by the requirements of the software you want run. Had mine just been serving files from a spare room, I could have got away with recycling an older system, but since it would also double-up as my main entertainment PC it needed something extra.

The easiest solution was to decide on a good standalone entertainment PC specification, then beef it up with whatever would be required by the server side of things. Luckily, modern desktop components are so powerful, the only area which needed additional work was the storage.

As the system would be running most of the time, it was important to choose components that could run quietly, while ideally consuming as little power as possible. Intel’s Core 2 Duo meets both requirements and has sufficient muscle to handle multiple clients.

Using components I knew to be stable from earlier tests, I fitted a Core 2 Duo E6700 processor into an Asus P5W DH Deluxe motherboard with 2GB of Crucial DDR-2 memory and a Zalman CNPS9500 heatsink to keep the processor cool, with the minimum of noise.

If you also intend to use your media server as an entertainment PC, the choice of graphics card is important. I used a Gigabyte NX66256DP Nvidia Geforce 6600 PCI-Express graphics card, which runs silently and has sufficient power to decode H.264 high-definition video.

It was fine for my requirements, but if you’re also after HDMI connectivity, support for HDCP copy protection or better 3D performance, you’d want to go for a better model; at least it’s a component that’s easily upgraded if necessary.

Finally, for the TV recording side of things, I opted to recycle a pair of tried and trusted GDI Black Gold DVB PCI tuner cards. If you were buying new, though, you may wish to consider one of GDI’s newer dual tuner products.

Storage
So far I’ve pretty much described an entertainment PC, and while that’s certainly part of the system requirements, what exactly turns it into a server? As far as this project’s concerned, it’s the software and storage.

In terms of storage, it’s easy to stick your head in the sand and just fit the biggest hard disk available, but while it’ll deliver plenty of capacity, I’m just not comfortable entrusting my media collection to a single disk. If it fails, you stand to lose too much, not just in terms of time spent ripping discs, but more crucially digital photos, which may not exist anywhere else.

Protection against disk failure is an essential aspect of any server, and Raid is the technology to do the job. Following recent tests I opted for a Raid 5 array to deliver decent fault tolerance with a minimal loss of capacity. I initially went for an array with three affordable 300GB Seagate 7200.9 hard disks to give 600GB capacity, but adding a fourth disk would be an easy upgrade in the future, taking the array to 900GB.

To maximise transportability, I connected these disks to a Promise Fast Trak TX4310 Raid host adapter, although for greater performance and expandability you may wish to go for a hardware Raid card such as the Promise Supertrak EX8350. It’s not the cheapest Raid 5 solution (and requires a PCI Express x4 slot), but has decent read and write performance, a low CPU overhead and plenty of upgradability, with support for up to eight disks.

As discussed before, though, software-based Raid 5 as offered by the TX4310 and most motherboard controllers doesn’t have sufficient write speed for reliable TV recording, especially if you’re recording two shows simultaneously. So I connected an additional 300GB disk to the motherboard controller for temporary TV storage and installed the operating system on it as well.

This may seem like overkill, especially as Raid 1 has sufficient performance for recording TV, but there are portability advantages to keeping the array separate. Besides, in order to deliver 600GB using Raid 1, you’d still need four 300GB disks.

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