Sever/Archive Machine Needed

[Crusader]

Alright over the past year I had my Powerbook serving out large video files, and handling a massive amount of bandwidth in general. I was transferring up to 18 Gbs per day across my network connection and harddrive. Needless to say, my Powerbook did not take such abuse well... it sought revenge on me buy panicking one night while I was working on an essay and when I booted up, my HD was slag. A new harddrive, and an Applecare purchase later I decided that I needed to have a computer that would handle these data transferring tasks separately.

Now I'm looking into what options I have available. I'm looking for a computer that can be run continuously, with at least 180 GBs of storage available, that would be able to scale up to about a TB of data. It can be either Mac OS or Windows; the software I'm looking to run doesn't currently run on any Linux or UNIX variants. I was looking at IBM xSeries servers, but the last servers I had a hand in setting up were 5k dell beasts, and needless to say, that won't fit my college student's budget.

Any suggestions?

edit: A Linux version does exist, so that opens that platform up for consideration. Also the computer must be-able to run VLC.

[staph]

Is there any particular reason why you can't use a commodity PC or just throw something together from random PC parts? Obviously if you could run it off the PowerBook it can't be too taxing.

[pilot1129]

yeah, a basic pentium 4 or athlon processor in a 512 basic off the shelf machine should do this just fine. just as long as you're on a SATA hard drive and a gigabit card/switch, shouldnt be a problem

[staph]

I suppose if you were feeling really concerned about data integrity after your PowerBook meltdown, you might want to go for a RAID 0 or 5. Some motherboards come with hardware RAID support, although I don't know if you'd find many with RAID 5, at least not cheaply. SATA drives with native command queuing support might also be a bit better at being quiet and reducing the chances of failure of the mechanism. The Maxtor-Quantum 16MB cache SATA drives are apparently pretty good.

Even gigabit ethernet is probably overkill if you're only transferring 20GB a day.

Out of curiosity, what is the server software you intend to run?