Re:PC obsolescence is obsolete
by freehunter on Tuesday August 21, 2012 @11:44AM
(#4413199)
There is a valid case for "powerful" home servers. Centrally backing up all the PCs in the house and streaming media to computers/TVs/consoles/tablets are two things I do in my house with my server. Granted it's not a brand new system, but it's a Core 2 Quad with 8GB of RAM, 20TB of hard drive space, and a Radeon 5700. Streaming and storing HD video isn't cheap. This centralized server is more cost-effective and convenient than all of my roommates having the media stored locally, though.
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Re:PC obsolescence is obsolete
by rogerbinns on Tuesday August 21, 2012 @01:16PM
(#4413623)
You don't need need memory or CPU power for streaming or backups, unless you are doing on the fly transcoding. You do need storage connectivity but even USB2 has a theoretical throughput of 60 megabytes per second while you'll get practical throughput of ~35 megabytes per second on gigabit ethernet.
The only time I saw my ~2005 era system have non-trivial CPU usage was when doing encryption, and even then it would peak at around 25% of CPU.
Re:PC obsolescence is obsolete
by freehunter on Tuesday August 21, 2012 @03:50PM
(#4414417)
Encryption and compression are what the CPU and memory are for. The video card is for transcoding to deliver to the target system. It's mainly just a re-used system, but you wouldn't be able to do it with a PII and 64MB of RAM.