Preface
I believe many friends have had the experience of watching local movies, especially in the early 21st century, when the network bandwidth was only a few M. Many friends who like to watch TV series usually rent movie CDs at the computer store, and then come back to copy them to the computer and then watch TV series. Because the computer is more enjoyable to watch TV shows, you can fast forward and drag at will, and you can also skip scenes you don’t want to watch.
now has reached gigabits of network bandwidth, so people usually follow TV shows online, and there is no need to save movies and TV series to the local area. Of course, for friends who need to reprocess the video, or watch higher definition videos, or need to archive and store the videos they took, local computer storage is naturally indispensable.
Some friends are wondering whether they can build a local server to store these media files by themselves? Then you can access these media anywhere, isn’t it very convenient? So is it feasible to build a local media server in person? Can I use a used old computer when building a media server? What should I pay attention to? Next, answer these questions here.
Current media server trend
The current popular audio and video multimedia files are generally larger in size. The picture files taken by professional cameras are often more than ten megabytes, or even dozens of megabytes. For general video files, a few Gs are a little longer, and dozens of Gs are very common. This leads to the fact that when building a media server, we need to consider that the hardware configuration of the media server can meet the basic needs of media file storage, playback, transmission, etc., so generally speaking, older computers are more difficult to meet these requirements.
Performance indicators of media server
Measuring the performance of a home media server mainly requires reference to several indicators such as network bandwidth, disk space, disk speed, memory, CPU, etc. For general gigabit network card , if there is a 1G video file on the media server and needs to be copied to the office computer through the network, if other hardware bottlenecks are not considered, it will take 10 seconds to copy. If it is an old computer with a 100-megabit network card, it will take more than 1 minute to copy it.
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Therefore, building a media server requires planning the requirements first, and then selecting hardware to install the multimedia system. The deployment of the multimedia system should be the easiest step. The key is to first plan the system performance and match the hardware.
Of course, for some media servers that are only used as pictures or files storage, the hardware resources requirements are relatively low. You can consider using old and idle computers to build them. There are many systems for media servers, such as Synology, Wei Unicom , Tie Wei Ma , open source such as trueNAS, OpenMediaVault, etc.
NAS rise
With the rapid development of information technology, the rapid popularization and upgrading of electronic products such as mobile phones and digital cameras, and media data has also seen explosive growth. According to relevant data, the current data growth rate of my country's data centers exceeds 5TB per second. So is there any better solution for the storage of personal multimedia data with such a huge amount of data? The answer to
is of course yes. For online methods, network disks have been developed in the past few years. For some large IT companies, the network disk capacity provided by them has even reached tens of TB. Of course, online network disks ultimately face the problem of transmission speed and cannot meet the storage needs of large files used at high frequency. Therefore, local storage media servers have developed, that is, NAS.
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NAS has unique advantages in mass storage and fast access of local data. For example, the more mainstream NAS on the market are all transmitted 10 Gigabit network, and the solid-state cache hard disk is speeded up, which can completely transmit dozens of GB of video files in a few seconds.
summary
Comprehensive the above analysis, it is not difficult to find that the current situation of using old computers to build media servers will definitely be less and less, and it is not recommended that computer novices do it (computer experts ignore it). After all, nowadays, network disks and NAS products are quite mature, and there is no need to spend more time and energy on such things.
