How important is the CPU in a (file) server? As usual, seeing what some of you others are doing has inspired me to do some more thinking. I’m running out of hard drive space, left and right, on the majority of my PC’s. I’ve thought about adding a bigger hard drive to my HTPC; I already have a 250gb internal and a 500gb external. I can see that it is going to be an ongoing thing of running out of hard drive space. So I have decided to think about the server/NAS route. I used to want striclty a NAS, but they’re so expensive compared to what you get. So I’ve thought about building my own 24/7 server. I only want it to host the video and music files. I’m not going to be putting tuners in it and then running clients through out the house. All my cables are already run into the family room or my son’s room, but not in my computer room (where I would put the server), so I’m not going through the trouble of doing more drilling and running wire into that room. So, what I’d like to do is use gigabit everywhere; have one hard drive dedicated to recording from my HTPC, one hard drive dedicated to recording from my son’s PC, one hard drive for music, one for ripped DVDs, one for downloaded files (such as game demos, patches, etc.), and you get the idea. And alternatively, maybe just use separate partitions rather than separate hard drives; I might could get by using one large hard drive for music and downloaded files. My other “out there” idea is to use Ubuntu. But I don’t know much about Linux. I ran Ubuntu from a CD once and it looked straight forward, but I don’t know what I might run into. Heck, I wouldn’t even know how to partition in Ubuntu at this point. Am I getting out of my league? I don’t really want to spend the money on Windows Home Server or even a copy of Windows XP or Vista. Is anything special needed to run Ubuntu as a server for a bunch of Windows PC’s?
Back to the original question, how important is the cpu in this? I’ve heard some people say that servers don’t need fast hardware, and then I’ve seen some saying to use a quad core cpu. I want to keep things as energy efficient as possible, so I was looking at a Celeron 430 (1.8 ghz) 35 watts or a LE-1640 Athlon 64 (2.6 ghz) 45 watts. Are either of these choices OK?
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