Worth upgrading old computer for server use?

Inspirement · March 23, 2016

So I'm upgrading my 8 year old PC and plan to use the mobo, CPU and RAM from it to make a media and file server.

I'm almost ready to do the upgrade (only have the CPU left to buy, and I'll order that in two days) and I've gotten two 4TB and one 2TB drives to pair with the one 2TB drive I already had to go into the server, so with RAID1 I'd get a total of 6TB of storage on the server. The other hardware I have is:

Asus M3A78 motherboard

AMD Athlon 64 X2 6000+ CPU

4GB Crucial Value RAM

I will use the server for storing and streaming mainly movies and TV shows in 1080p or less within my small apartment to one device at a time using Plex, but it'll also be doing file serving and backup duties.

I'm still on the fence on what OS to use, but my best option seems to be FreeNas, with the only problem being that 4GB RAM of the system (FreeNas minimum being 8). But with DDR2 RAM being so cheap, do you think it'd be worth it buying 8, or even 16GB of RAM on eBay? The manual says this motherboard even supports ECC RAM, so that would probably be the best, right? And since AM2+ socket motherboards support AM3 CPUs, should I also go all in and get a quadcore Athlon or Phenom CPU for this thing to help with transcoding?

Edited March 23, 2016 by Inspirement
Fixed slight paragraph issue