Hey Everyone,
I have read a bunch of articles on here about building a home media server and setting everything up, however I have one problem. I'm broke and don't want to spend a ton just to stream some movies/music to my SmartTv/PS3. I have an old dell dimension desktop my folks gave me and I think it will be fine to use, however its an old IDE/PATA system and the storage is only 40gb. It has a P4 2.4 processor w/ 750 mb ram and streaming via wire ethernet. I was wondering what is the easiest way to add more storage and still be able to stream on this old device with no hickups or lagging. I am looking at options of:
External portable HDD USB 2.0, however I worried streaming off this may cause some lag. ($60)
Get a IDE/PATA 250gb hdd ($30 on craigslist) and run it as a slave drive with my current 40gb hdd.
Get a SATA drive and a SATA PC Card. (HDD on CL $40 and $20 sata card).
What do you think would run best and would any of these have a problem streaming to a ps3/smarttv via Ethernet. (I have streamed a .mp4 and worked fine but worried about MKV, no transcoding required).
I have read a bunch of articles on here about building a home media server and setting everything up, however I have one problem. I'm broke and don't want to spend a ton just to stream some movies/music to my SmartTv/PS3. I have an old dell dimension desktop my folks gave me and I think it will be fine to use, however its an old IDE/PATA system and the storage is only 40gb. It has a P4 2.4 processor w/ 750 mb ram and streaming via wire ethernet. I was wondering what is the easiest way to add more storage and still be able to stream on this old device with no hickups or lagging. I am looking at options of:
External portable HDD USB 2.0, however I worried streaming off this may cause some lag. ($60)
Get a IDE/PATA 250gb hdd ($30 on craigslist) and run it as a slave drive with my current 40gb hdd.
Get a SATA drive and a SATA PC Card. (HDD on CL $40 and $20 sata card).
What do you think would run best and would any of these have a problem streaming to a ps3/smarttv via Ethernet. (I have streamed a .mp4 and worked fine but worried about MKV, no transcoding required).