What should I do?

[lone wolf]

Hello Everyone,

its pretty much as the title says, here is my situation

I currently have a nice little box running, I won't call it a true server but I use it at home to share files across my network. specs are:

Asus M4A88TD-V Evo
AMD Phenom X6 1075 3.0
8GB Memory
Areca ARC-1210 4 port RAID Card
4 x 2 TB hard drives in RAID 5 attached to above card
4 x 2 TB hard drives attached to motherboard
CoolerMaster 690II PC Case
Windows 7 Pro

I have been using it as a media rig it also serves as my daily driver. My wife has been using this pc now for her facebook, Sims 3 games. I am nervous about this as I don't want to lose all of my data to hackers, virus' and whatnot. I have ESET on it for A/V But this past weekend I came across a super deal:

ASrock 970 Extreme 3 motherboard
AMD 8120 8 Core @ 3.1
16 GB Memory
3 120 GB SSD drives
Nvidia GTX 560 video card

I put all of this into my older Coolermaster 590 case, and I will say it is super sweet.

now here is where I am getting hung up.

This is way to much in my house. I have the following:

1 HTPC in Living Room
1 HTPC in Bed Room
2 Laptops
2 Vizio Tablets
1 PC for children

1 PC that doubles as backup server for local business' to backup their data to for offsite storage.

Sorry, almost done. I really like the idea of seperating my media from my other day to day stuff, surfing the internet, my wife's facebook, etc. but I'm sure that my power bill is going to start going up like mad. I just finished paying off a 1k power bill, and now its already back up to 700$.

is it ok for everything to be combined? I am thinking about using the ASRock and 8 core and just adding the HDD's to this box and just continue to use it as an all in one. Basically I am thinking of consilidating everything, just to start saving a bit, I know that things are tight so I just wnat to help my family as much as possible, not put us in the poorhouse so to speak. I probably shouldn't have gotten this but it was a deal that I couldn't pass up.

I really appreciate any feed back you may offer.

 

[dustNbone]

You don't need a monster PC to serve files from. An 8 core is insanely overkill for this job, for almost every job actually. File serving could be done just as well by an i3 or low power athlon, maybe even an Atom. 2 or 4GB of RAM and low power hard drives, it shouldn't really use much power at all.

Bottom line is to get the box that needs to run 24/7 using as little power as necessary, and power the 6 and 8 core monster beasts up only when they're being used.

Same goes for HTPCs, they don't need much horsepower at all these days if all they're doing is media playback. Power demands go up very quickly as CPU and GPU performance increase, not to mention making noisy boxes that noone wants in their living room.

 

[jwcalla]

$700 / mo is a lot.

Get a kill-a-watt and find out how much wattage those PCs are taking up. Like dustNbone says you should only need one up 24/7.

 

[lone wolf]

My home is over 4k sq ft. and kids leave things running all of the time.

I built this media "server" over two years ago, and it doubles as my daily driver. I got the parts for the new system for free so I was just thinking of updating my daily rig with these. I honestly don't have anything smaller than a X4 240, thats pretty bad. I have a kill-a-watt somewhere so I will plug it directly in and see what it is pulling down power wise.

In my line I get these deals that I just can't pass up, and then in the end I want to sell them but no one in my town here wants to pay what they are worth. Too much pawn stars and storage wars.

Why doesn't someone come up with "the IT life"