Modernizing media server?

zengal

Honorable
Dec 8, 2012
20
0
10,510
I have a old media server to hold my DVD rips and TV recordings that I built back in 2005 using a CoolerMaster CM Stacker case and five 3-into-2 drive cages. It has a 2.6 ghz P4 with 1.5 Gb of memory running XP Pro SP2. It has a 3Ware 7506-12 PATA RAID controller with 12 PATA drives partitioned into two RAID 5 units (one 2 TB the other 1.5 TB) connected to it. I also have 4 external fanless two disk ESata RAID 1 cases connected to it as well as two 4 bay Sans Digital USB 2.0 external cases. I'm starting to have trouble with the drives connected to the 3Ware controller. Since PATA drives are hard to come by these days I was thinking about replacing the motherboard with a newer up to date one and retiring at least the 3ware controller and 12 PATA drives.

I understand that there are some AMD motherboards that offer up to 10 SATA ports. Is there a way to use one of these boards to update my setup. I don't want a Norco type case because they are too noisy and expensive. I also can't afford a server motherboard. I'd very much like RAID redundancy on the drives holding my DVD rips because it's a royal pain to rerip them. I have them separated into different categories (Movie DVD rips TV Show DVD Rips, etc so I don't want them all in one big pool). I'd also like to have the drives be formatted in NTFS instead of Linux so I can just pop them into another machine to read them. Any ideas on how to go about this? Thanks.
 
go with a standard asus mb that has two intel 6g ports and 4 3g ports. then use a 3 party 4 port sata card for the other 4 drives.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816124027
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811352024
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811352023
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811146100
what i would do is pick up a 120g ssd and a 20.00 burner for installing the os onto the server. put the ssd in the 5.25 with a tray adaptor. then use a standard case to hold the 8 data drives. then need a large power supply and a i3/i5 cpu or amd mb.