Project finished 2005/06/20:

This project was intended to provide a media server for our home network. Parts include:
4 Western Digital 200GB Hard Disks
4 Seagate 200GB Hard Disks
2 Promise FastTrak SX4100 hardware RAID 5 controllers
1 Chieftec Model CX CH-03B-B-A-OP (ch-03b-b-a) Server case
1 ASUS P5B motherboard
4 Silenx 14db fans

This server provides a warehouse for movies and music (or any other digital media), and a backup location for PC's on the local LAN, protected in a RAID 5 configuration. It has worked well in these basic capacities thus far, with no problems to report. I've been thinking of adding Media streaming capability, using VLC for media distribution. However I've not had any problems pulling the media directly from the server to the client machines, basically using the server as a NAS.

The movies for our in-house theater are fed from this remote server to the HTPC front end located in the theater. This works very well, and the throughput of the disk subsystem is more than enough to feed multiple client machines both music and movies simultaneously. The real bottle-neck for most home networks will be the network topology, not disk speed or bus throughput. In my case I use both wired and wireless networks. The wired network is switched 100bt over category 6 cable. For wireless I use a Netgear MIMO solution. I've been pleasantly surprised with the wireless performance, as I am able to stream DVD quality video without any frame rate problems. At the TCP level, jitter and latency are quite acceptable.

Conclusions:

In the excitement to get this project off the ground, I purchased the hard disks before settling on a chassis. I've since discovered that a chassis built around a SATA backplane would have been much more desirable to the PATA RAID cards I purchased, (since all the drives are PATA based). That said, I've filled up the capacity of the eight drives already and am planning on adding another storage device. Speeds continually increase, capacities increase etc. Price per MB (or GB anymore), has steadily decreased since my initial disk purchases. The next generation of this project will be SATA based using a server chassis, or external disk chassis with at least 12 slots for pluggable SATA drives, which I will fill with 500GB drives. This is in anticipation of storing HD media.