I have two IDE hard drives in external enclosures that I use to store my media (fansubs, MP3s, etc.). What I would like to do is drop them into a small form-factor box that is extremely quiet, hook it up as a server on our wireless network, and just use it to easily store the files.
I'm a little out of the loop; I haven't built a box in some time. How much should I look to spend on this semi-server? Can I just hook my laptop up to it instead of spending money on a monitor I may never use? What's a decent OS I can use to run it without reformatting everything? What can I do to make it super-quiet and guarantee as much uptime as I can possibly get?
Sorry to sound like a n00b, but I've only built regular Windows desktops. Any and all input is welcome.
>Can I just hook my laptop up to it instead of spending money on a monitor I may never use?
yes. installing an os without a monitor may be difficult, but you can probably borrow one from another computer for that...
>What's a decent OS I can use to run it without reformatting everything?
if the drives are formatted as fat32, i'd recommend freebsd, dragonfly, netbsd, openbsd, or linux (in that order). if they're ntfs, i'd recommend reformatting them.
you'll probably have to format whatever drive the os is running from, but you probably already know that.
>What can I do to make it super-quiet and guarantee as much uptime as I can possibly get?
underclock your processor enough that you don't need to use a noisy cooling system and put freebsd on it.
I can't really reformat the drives (they're NTFS). They're 200gb and 250gb each, the former 95% full and the latter 80%. :-/
I also have no knowledge or experience in non-Windows OSes... hopefully they aren't too difficult. -_-
How do I underclock a processor?
>>Can I just hook my laptop up to it instead of spending money on a monitor I may never use?
>yes. installing an os without a monitor may be difficult, but you can probably borrow one from another computer for that...
Well… If you're wondering if it's possible to use your laptop display as a display for another computer, the answer is no, not sanely. However, once you get a graphical system on there, you can use VNC to control the machine from your laptop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_Network_Computing
So you want to do this using a non-Windows OS, but you have no experience with Unix? I'd take a class before you try to go any further, or failing that give up and just stick with Windows on it.
As for underclocking, the methods for doing that are usually the same as those for overclocking. It's just done less commonly, for obvious reasons. So just search for info on how to overclock whatever processor you decide to use, and that should tell you what you want to know. (Or, of course, you could just pick up the weakest and coolest processor you can find, but the advantage of underclocking a more powerful processor is that you can use it again in the future at full power if you want to.)