I'm building a server for my brother. The major purpose will be storage/Plex. It'll need to be able to serve at least 2 simultaneous streams. It will likely need to live with his other A/V equipment, although not necessarily. I'll be giving him a chromecast to act as the Plex client, driven from the Plex iOS app. It is also possible he'll have an older Mac Mini to act as the "front end" as well.
I'm giving him just enough drives to get started (2) but want it to be very easy for him to add more as he can afford to. He's also got a ton of DVDs that he wants to rip, so I'll need an optical drive for use with MakeMKV as well. This is his first media server, and it is going to be a learning process for him, which he is expecting and looking forward to.
Budget is $750, and as you can see:
PCPartPicker part list: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/xWZ3dC
Price breakdown by merchant: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/xWZ3dC/by_merchant/
CPU: Intel Core i5-3330 3.0GHz Quad-Core Processor ($178.94 @ SuperBiiz)
Motherboard: ASRock H77M Micro ATX LGA1155 Motherboard ($69.99 @ Newegg)
Memory: Kingston Fury Series 8GB (1 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($69.99 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive ($114.00 @ Amazon)
Storage: Western Digital Red 3TB 3.5" 5400RPM Internal Hard Drive ($114.00 @ Amazon)
Case: Silverstone GD08B (Black) HTPC Case ($147.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: Corsair Builder 750W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($74.99 @ NCIX US)
Optical Drive: Pioneer BDC-207DBK Blu-Ray Reader, DVD/CD Writer ($39.99 @ Newegg)
Total: $809.89
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2014-12-06 18:03 EST-0500
I'm over