Setting up a Server

[ThinkPad560X]

I have a IBM System X3200 with a Intel Xeon and I think 8GB or 32GB RAM Max and has a 80GB SATA drive with 3 more HDD slots left. I was woundering if I can install all my DVD movies and games on the server "probably get a 3TB for movies" "2TB for games" and access/stream them through the server to my basic PC and save room and put all the movies and games in storage.

[craigmontHunter]

I have a server setup kind of like what you're looking for. I have a older pentium D ultrasmall dell desktop with a couple of usb drives on it with my movies, program installers and general backup of all my stuff. For movies, if you set it up as a media server, you can stream to any device capable of viewing streaming media. I have an app for my playbook and windows media player works as well. As for games and stuff, you can save copies of the installation files (steam backups/disk images), however you have to install them on the local system.

The full specs of my server are:
Dell Optiplex 745, pentium D 945
2gb DDR2 ram
240gb system drive
1tb usb backup drive
3tb usb drive for storage.
Windows Server 2012 Essentials

With the specs of your system, you shouldn't have any issue streaming HD media to whatever. For codecs I use the shark007 pack, which allows it to stream mkv files as well as the normal windows files.

As usual, YMMV, this is just what works for me.

[twistero]

You need very little processing power for just a file sharing server.
I have a Seagate Dockstar "server" which has an 1.2GHz ARM-compatible processor, 128MB RAM, and a 1TB USB external hard drive as storage. It has an installation of Arch Linux, and runs samba shares (i.e. Windows-style shared folders), SSH, an HTTP server, bittorrent client and emule client without breaking a sweat. I have quite a bit of HD content on there, and have no problem viewing them from Windows by simply mounting the shared folders.

[craigmontHunter]

^Very true - for file and printer sharing and downloading, you don't need much power. Where you need power is if you want to use it as a media server where it reencodes on the server side and sends that over the network, which is useful for mobile devices (watching HD videos on my playbook does load my server)

For the system you have, you could run a fairly substantial virtualization system.