Have decided to take the plunge and make a home server. I was looking at the excellent HP Mediasmart but decided I could do better for less money, and besides I like a challenge
I thought it might be useful for anyone else thinking of going down this route to document the build a bit.
HARDWARE SETUP
The spec I have selected is
New:
Silverstone SUGO SG03-B Case
LG GH20NS10 DVD writer
750 GB Samsung HD753LJ Spinpoint F1
Bits I already had:
200Gb Maxtor Drive
400Gb Seagate ST3400833AS Drive
500Gb Samsung HD501LJ
Bought from forums / ebay:
(all socket 939)
AMD Athlon x2 3800 CPU
Asrock 939NF6G-VSTA Motherboard
1GB DDR 3200 Memory
Corsair HX520 Power Supply
The stuff I had to buy came to around £250. I am going to be running Ubuntu Server so that's free.
I could have done it cheaper but I really liked the Silverstone case which needed a separate PSU. (together ~ £110 as opposed to the Antec NSK3480 which I could have had including PSU for £55)
I decided on a dual core CPU as I will be encoding some video on this box (Bluray rips to MKV) so needed a bit of grunt.