Using your main pc for video display and as a file server

[arkania]

Guys,

Need some techie input here, as I can't seem to find any info on the web pertaining to this.

Does anyone know what kind of performance hit, if any, a workstation suffers when used for processing video (with preprocessing such as ffdshow) as well as a file server?

Here's my situation: I have an AMD 2200 server 700+gig (3 ide drives, 4 sata drives with a promise controller) that serves files to two other pc's in my house. It also acts as my video controller/media center for my home theatre.

Am I sacrificing performance (wasting cpu cycles) for dvd playback if I'm also using it as a file server? Would I be better off creating a separate NAS box for file serving?

I don't really know if it's an issue or not, but any input, as always, is appreciated!

Gary.

[arkania]

No thoughts on this guys?

[rhinoman]

I started off with xlobby ruuning from my file server. With a cheap raid card that used the servers processor to do the xor calculations. The problems I encountered were writes were slow and if you wrote to the array when you were playing music the music stoppedand stuttered.

I think that you are asking a lot of a machine to do FFDshow and anything else at the same time. You really would need a dual procesor machine for this. Probably better to split it and have seperate machines for each purpose.

[arkania]

John,

Yeah, I kinda figured that but just wanted to hear someone else confirm it. Thanks for the reply.

I'm going to put my sata drives in an older box and use a neat little os called Darma Nas (linux based) as my file server. Wish me luck!


Gary.

[rhinoman]

Hmm, I read about Darma NAS at AVS, let us know how you get on.

[arkania]

I'll most likely be setting up my NAS this weekend, will let you know how it goes John.

Gary.