This adds up in a hurry, and gobbles storage like nothing else. A season of "Agents of SHIELD" - another 30GB.
That HD "Star Wars" rip collection of Episode I though VII plus "Rogue One" easily chews through 26GB by itself.
Encoded at a medium bitrate, a 1080p movie in H.264 is about 2GB per hour - more for higher resolutions. What media is going to be hosted? Everybody has a lot of music at about 4MB per song, but video is potentially a much larger footprint on home servers in a smaller file count. So, before you hit Amazon and check out multiple-drive arrays, VESA mounting brackets, and the like, its good to assess what you want to do with it. Like a marshmallow in a vacuum chamber, the thoughts about the capability of a home server grow to fit the container.
You start with a simple idea in a TextEdit document, and then the scope somehow.
The answers to three questions will help avoid multiple (seemingly mandatory) repeat trips to the local computer or electronics superstore.Ī home server grows. Before we roll into the nitty-gritty of the home server project, we're going to discuss what you want, versus what you need, cross-referenced with what you have. With any project, right after the "yeah, what a good idea" part comes the "huh, what do I need" assessment. Spousal approval is an issue sometimes, as well. Not so fast, champ! If you've ever thought that mounting a Mac mini with velcro to the underside of a cabinet might be fun - this is for you! If the thought of zip-tying a drive in place until you find just the right bracket, or coming up with similar solutions improvised in the heat of mortal combat with a pile of plastic and silicon scares you to death, stick with a NAS.
So, through all 18 years of this project, I think I've spent about $1000, and only on storage, inexpensive software solutions, and funky cabling throughout the years. Most of the hardware I've used along the way has been part of the "upgrade cascade." Instead of a relation getting the latest retired gear, I've moved it to a server. Is cloud storage the wave of the future? Sure, but I've had a personal cloud for well more than a decade, and almost two. We now run Time Machine backups from this machine, media streaming from iTunes and some other apps like Plex and StreamToMe, and also provide a proxy Wi-Fi network for the kids, with very strict filtering and monitoring. We've got literally hundreds of gigabytes of family photos - including some pictures taken more than 50 years ago - now scanned and cleaned up.Īlong the way, I've messed around with a Nicecast radio station for friends (Beats zero?), a "Minecraft" server, "Unreal Tournament Classic" well past its golden years, and encoding media of all sorts for playback on an Apple TV, all with exactly zero impact on my day-to-day production equipment. We started ripping our DVDs when we migrated from the 6500 to a G4, and connected a G4 Mac mini to a SD TV, just in time for the Apple TV to arrive after the first HD television came into the house. Music is streamed all over the house, and has been for 13 years.
This whole process has carved through several G4 towers through 2008, shifting to a brief dalliance in the Hackintosh community in 20, back to native hardware with a re-cored Mac Pro (1,1) loaded with eight SATA drives in 2010 through 2014, culminating in a 2012 quad-core i7 Mac mini with an external storage tower with four drives right now. Did you know that with the right trays, removal of the optical drive, and a PCI ATA card, you can get six hard drives inside with no power issues? The G4 tower that was the family's main Mac was replaced with a G4 iMac, so the G4 tower became the server. All of a sudden, I had an array of PCI slots at my beck and call for USB, or what have you. At the same time, the G3 shifted to OS X. The 6500 didn't boot one day, so the project to move the home server to the Beige G3 accelerated.
Then, in about the winter of 2002, hardware started aging less gracefully.
Ultimately, we took the monitor away, and controlled it with Apple Network Assistant, then Apple Remote Desktop, and now Screen Sharing.