Media Servers

[Silverado]

Im currently using a Zyxel NSA210 and thinking of upgrading to something with multiple drive bays for data redundancy and was interested in seeing what sorts of media servers everyone else is using.

What kind do you have or what do you use for your home media server needs. What functions or features sold you on it and why.

[Kaito]

I guess I never thought I needed one of these. I usually make the spare pc do some of this...
Now that Ive looked at it I can see why its popular.

Newegg says yours is discontinued Silverado..
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822336012

ZyXEL’s NSA210 is a feature-packed, inexpensive home media machine for home users. This little box supports one SATA hard drive up to 2 TB for you to store and share every photo, song, and video clip. With support for HTTP/FTP/BitTorrent/eMule protocols, it’s able to perform your downloads that are scheduled when you’re not home! For media sharing, the DLNA-certified NSA210 also works as iTunes & Squeezebox server to share streaming music and can automatically upload your newly updated photos and videos to flickr and YouTube. Packed with rich features like energy saving, hard disk health monitoring and complete backup solutions, the NSA210 is the indeed the ultimate Digital Home Media machine.

[Silverado]

You can find them on Amazon i bought this one a couple years ago. The biggest advantage over these machines and using an old PC as a server would be the cost of energy to power them. This one uses 30W so its impact on the electric bill is very small. The second benefit would be for those who dont want to configure a server and maintain it and hunt down all the software they need to do the things a media server out of the box can do. This was plugged in and with the starter utility up and running in 5 minutes.

There not bad at all but im ready for an upgrade as mine is kinda crossing into the old category.

[Warfire]

Like Kaito I don't use an off the shelf but I do have a machine I built for the task:

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/proli ... b=features

These can get very cheap (I paid about £150 after rebate). I've run all sorts of odd software but now I just run Windows 8 Pro and that does everything I want. If you buy a drive bay converter you can get 4 media disks, two SSDs and a slim Blu Ray drive in.. makes it very powerful.

[Exeter]

I have an old dual core laptop, with dual drives. I also like connecting drives to the network directly or USB 3 seems to be fine. Media is not a CPU intensive item and only a couple in use at a time.

For use I don't use it, my laptop has dual, terrsbyte SSDs so very fast for movies