The Best Laid Plans of Mice and Men

So here is the plan. I am going to be building a whole new system for the home server. This system is going to be utilizing an AMD A6 Quad-Core APU. This is a 2.6 GHz chip with integrated graphics. The integrated graphics will be needed for the initial setup, but then will run headless. I will be pairing this with either 4GB or 8GB of DDR3 RAM. I plan on starting out with a 32GB SSD for the Ubuntu OS. A SSD is lower power, and lasts longer than a mechanical drive. The storage will be handled with two 2TB drives to start out with; I will have the option to add another 3 large capacity drives. One will be dedicated to tv shows, and another to movies. Music isn’t really a concern with services like Spotify and Pandora. Maybe a small portion will allow us to stream music if there is a large enough base to be worth the trouble of ripping CDs. All of this will be housed inside a case, and currently the front runner is the Rosewill R5 Mid-Tower case. This case holds 6 hard drives, with the capacity for 10 fans. I like the option of having fans that blow air directly over the hard drives. This will keep the hard drives cool under pressure. To keep the CPU cool, I am looking into the Cooler Master Hyper 212 [+ or EVO]. $30, high performance. Sold.

On the software side, Ubuntu 12 is the OS of choice. In here, Plex will be running 24/7. Why Plex? The Media Server side is compatible with Ubuntu. And the client software can be installed and stream media on Windows, OS X, Linux, Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and the Roku player. That covers everything in my planned future house. Sold. For the networking, I am going to be setting up a media network. I believe that the internet is coming with us, and I want to build off this. The main can be used for guests, and general browsing. I want to use a separate router, switches, and boat loads of cables to set it up. I want to dedicate this for the media server to minimize usage, and to maximize the bandwidth available for streaming. Plan is set.

I want to test out the combo of Ubuntu and Plex on a old system to work out all the bugs, and to learn about the setup and performance. This will make the final build and setup easy as ever.