Hands on: Make your own media server

As our collections of digital photos, music and videos steadily increase, it makes sense to make the most of them. One of the best ways is to set up a PC as a media server and share the files throughout your home. One person could be playing an album, while another catches up on last night’s telly, as someone else reminisces over a slideshow of photos.

While many specialist companies are already selling dedicated media servers, it’s quite possible to build your own – and do a better job while you’re at it. The key is first to think carefully about what it should do.

For example, how much storage will you need and what degree of protection do you want for the data? What kind of client devices will your server support? Will it just store existing data, or will it download or record new content too, such as TV shows? Where will you house it and will it also be used to directly access content, perhaps in your living room?

The basic spec
The basic system specification for a media server doesn’t have to be anything special in terms of the processor, memory and motherboard. These specs are normally dictated by any software it has to run, such as recording TV shows or supporting a streaming appliance – and of course if it’s also going to be used as a standalone entertainment PC.

Since a media server will be switched on pretty much all the time, some energy-conscious people may prefer to build one around a low-power platform such as a mobile processor or modern Core 2 Duo. But since the basic spec really boils down to the requirements of the particular software you’ll be running, we’ll look at the really important stuff: storage, networking and operating systems.

Storage
Storage is arguably the most important element of a server, and when it comes to media files, you really can’t have too much. It also makes sense to factor in room for growth, but remember it’s easy to add an extra disk later on when they’re bigger and cheaper.

Fitting one of today’s cavernous hard disks would seem like a sensible first step, but it’s crucial to also consider data protection. Your media server is likely to house a vast amount of data that may not exist anywhere else, or may require considerable effort to recreate – think of all your digital photos and the music ripped from CDs or downloaded from stores.

So, rather than trust all your data to a single disk, which will fail at some point, it makes much more sense to use several disks working together in a Raid configuration. We’ve covered Raid in detail in recent Hardware and Performance columns, so I won’t go over old ground again. The important thing is to avoid Raid 0, which actually halves your protection, and instead go for Raid 1 or 5. It’s also good to choose a solution where additional disks can be added for extra capacity.

Raid 5 is a particularly good option for servers as it ‘wastes’ less space on providing redundancy than Raid 1, but there are implications for a media server. While Raid 5 is quick enough to dish out existing files, its write performance is poor, and probably insufficient to record TV shows.

So if your media server is also used for recording TV, you’ll either need to avoid Raid 5, or use an array in addition to a single disk. You could then record shows to the single disk and just copy them over to the Raid 5 array afterwards for protection. It’s not a bad idea to boot from a separate disk anyway, as it makes the Raid array more independent and transportable.

Finally, remember that Raid only offers protection against disk failure. Fire, flood or theft could still wipe out your server, so it’s worth backing it up and keeping the media elsewhere.