Hello,

I have tons of music cd's and DVD's copied to my pc. My goal is to build a centralized library which can be accessed from Tivo like interfaces around the house.

The central server only needs to have a LOT of storage space. Bare minimum 1TB to hold a large dvd and music collection.

My question is, what would be the most cost effective hardware to buy to run this on. I am assuming it wouldn't need a fast chip or much ram at all. Probably a Pentium 3 450mHz with 256mb of ram would do fine. No video card, No audio card, just a bunch of hard drives.

But what is the best way to ensure that no data is lost due to hardware failure. I guess mirrored raid is the only way to go, but then I would end up needing to purchase 2TB worth of drives, and I'm not sure I could fit that many on an old mother board.

If you were going to build your own terraserver, what would you use, and what linux distribution would you put on it?

scsi will give you enough drives from the specs I'd say so long as you stay away from hp or comaq you will be able to boot to scsi

Aren't SCSI drives expensive though?

They are more expensive than plain drives, but if you're interested in building a server with 1TB of capacity, mirrored, SCSI drives would be an excellent choice. It wouldn't be free though...