On Fri, 2007-09-21 at 20:53 +0100, John Bowden wrote: > On Friday 21 September 2007 11:39:03 Jim Wildman wrote: > > On Thu, 20 Sep 2007, John Bowden wrote: > > > (docs, music and DVD ) for all of these machines, print server, (two > > > ink-jets), mail server and later on a myth tv set up. Would SAMBA be the > > > best option for the file and print serving ? > > > > You realize the mythtv setup (if this machine is going to be the > > 'backend') really should be on a separate box? > > > > I was hoping a 2.6 gHz 32bit Athlon with 3Gb of ram would handle Myth and the > file storage. > It depends on your setup ... if you have a capture card that does Mpeg encoding then CPU power is not an issue. I have an 800Mhz Athlon XP (under clocked) system running a backend. The issue usually is if the box can keep up with the disk IO doing recording and streaming at the same time. I have two drives in the box, one for the OS and another for storing the video. The system does fine streaming to a front end at the same time it's recording std cable TV. Adding file services with lots of IO might cause problems, it depends on the exact load your putting on it, adding RAM and using RAID 01 (mirrored and striped) may work. If you had issues, build a cheap sempon system to do the MythTV duties may be cheaper than making the server capable of doing both. One note is RAID 1 is slower at writing that a single drive, but usually faster at reading. Paul