making a server out of my old pc

[tom sheinman]

hey there!

 

I have an old pc (intel core i5 3470 with 8GB of ram and a boot SSD)

I want to use as plex server and a back for the stuff on my computer/

 

I have a couple of question and hope you can help me:

1. is my pc strong enough?

2. is it worth it to install a debited server system (like FreeNAS/unRAID)?

3. now it's running windows and I made it network drive' when I try to write to it I get only 10MB/s 

my new pc have a 1GB network card and the old one 100MB if I will upgrade it to 1GB network card what speed should I be expecting? 

 

thanks for the help, I hope I was understandable... 

[royalba94]

i'm interested to see what other people say about this as well as I have similar questions (only mine's an i7 960 w/12gb ram lol)

 

As for the network card, a transfer speed of 10MB/s (mega-byte) in windows works out to about 80Mb/s (mega-bit) so sounds about right for the speeds you'd be getting using an old 100Mb/s NIC. Assuming your switches/router aren't a bottleneck then I believe getting a 1Gb/s NIC would help increase the transfer speeds. in ideal situations it'd be close to a 10x increase in transfer speed (10MB/s to 100MB/s) but that depends on if you have any other bottlenecks.

 

Hopefully that helps!

[orbitalbuzzsaw]

1 - Yes, in fact prob overkill, use the SSD elsewhere IMO

 

2 - I'd say no but some will disagree

 

3 - Not a networking guy

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

for file server use you might want to run Linux... just because Linux won't reboot your pc without your permission like Windows does. i don't think anyone wants a file server to restart on it's own...

[ShawnTD]

Freenas or a linux distro would be good. I have my server with an i3 and 8gb ram and a boot ssd with a few TB of storage. Works fine for me.

 

I also got server16 free from my school so I used that.

 

Yes putting in a pcie 1Gb nic should solve your problem granted you either have a 1Gb switch in between them or the switch side of your router is 1Gb. And your running cat6 cables.