Upgrading my digital life.

I have a few spare computer parts laying around in my life. So I have decided to make a home server. I don’t plan on using it currently in our apartment setup. I do plan on testing it and getting myself familiar with the setup needed and networking skills. I know for certain that at this time, we don’t have the infrastructure that is optimal for this network. I think I might use my parent’s house as a test bed, so to speak. But I have a few hiccups at this time. I have my elder AMD Athlon 64x2 2.7 GHz CPU with 4GB of DDR2 RAM. I am going to be using a few spare small capacity HHDs for the learning curve. On the other hand, I have a spare AM3 board that I could purchase a AMD Phenom IIx6 CPU and 2 or 4GB of DDR3 RAM to use. I will try it with the current hardware that I have on hand to see what the base performance will be. I want to use it to store all my media [Movies, TV Shows, Music, etc.] and stream it to my HTPC and any other computers and devices in my future home. My physical concerns are cooling. I want to keep the hardware cool but while minimizing noise. So I’m considering a new case for the build. Something inexpensive but with hard drive space. A full tower would be ideal because of the generous space for hard drives. This is still undecided. But I will be looking into lining the interior of the case with foam. This will reduce the amount of noise that will escape from the case from the fans, but will also reduce the amount of vibrations from the fans and spinning hard drives. As for the fans, I will use low noise, high air movement fans. On the software side, I will be trying out Ubuntu 12 as the basis for the first trial run. I think that this will do just fine due to its low hardware requirements. I just hope that this will not limit the streaming power. But if I am correct, I think that the heavy lifting for streaming content falls upon the device that is playing the content. So this is heavily in my favor. I am going to be throwing together a system in a case and getting the testing started. The fine tuning will occur when implemented in my future residence as some of it will require using features of the wireless router that will be used. Hopefully the ISP we choose lets us use our own router, so I will set up a second network to use for our own streaming, and allow the other one to be used for guests. Who knows. This will be decided as the time comes.