OK, I have been trying to decide weather to use a older computer I have as a file server to serve videos, music and pictures or using network hard drives such as western digital world books. Those seem simple but i have been reading that they are not that fast even on a gig ethernet which my network is giga capable. I wanna share files over my network to other computers, xboxs, streamers etc thru out my house

some of my thoughts are that I plan on using 3 hard drives 1 for music, 1 for videos and 1 for pictures. I have 2 possible computers to use, the one is a AMD athlon 1600 with 512 and it has udma 133. I would plan on adding a SATA/300 hard drive controller. my other option is I have a AMD athlon 64 with 2G mem which I currently use in my home theatre but plan taking out of my theatre because I built it before home theatre pc were popular and it is big and noisy since it is a a tower with lots of fans. Currently this computer does double duty as a storing all my music now and being a pvr/dvr. I store all my media on 1 hard drive, software on another drive and record on another. But anyway I was wondering if this computer could handle recording and being a file server and if i can set it up to record from remote computers etc... Then build a new htpc with a case to go along with my other equipment. I plan on making that a pvr/dvr as well but would like the flexablilty of beable to set up my other computer to record from a remote location.

i know thats alot babble but any help would be great

thanks you

Truning a PC into a new server is always best but consumes power and makes noise
unless you turn it into expensive passive cooling device. It will do the job and doesn't
even need to be so powerfull at all...

If choosing NAS...
Especially stay away from the so called network hard disks as they don't offer the administration you need to make things work flawless with all kinds of streamers. Look inside the brands Infrant, Synology and Thecus. These are the better models out there.

Budget: Synology
Quality: Infrant
Performance: Thecus (N5200 Pro running 1.5MHz celeron)

These have god performance all (if tweaked properly) but off course, not like a true PC.

Enjoy

well the noise doesnt really bother me because it will be in a equipment rack in the basement that has my network stuff on it. Now for power it just about stays on all the time as it is, but could i have it go in sleep mode? Also what software should I use, just XP win 2000 etc. any other software needed, I plan on having a monitor and keyboard at the location of where it is stored but would like to have control of it from other locations.
So a older Athlon Socket A 462 would be fast enough for a file server?

thanks
Ian