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It's time for me to put some more work on our home server setup, which is primarily about media.

Currently the home server (a Debian box) provides:

• some samba shares, which are only used occasionally
• backups with rsync
• music streaming with Squeezebox
• dhcp server, so I can pin the IP addresses of regular devices

It's not much, but it's useful stuff. The box that runs it is rather old (I got it in 2005) and I'm interesting in reducing its power consumption. I'd also like to increase its hard drive storage, but it uses IDE drives, so I'd need a new machine to use SATA drives.

At the same time, I'd like to do something about video. Netflix streaming is increasingly useful, and there other online video sources I could make use of. I could also rip DVDs, although I'm less inclined to do that than the music. It's not much effort to grab a DVD and put it in when we watch something, with music it was a much bigger deal. A complication for video streaming is my TV, which is sufficiently old to use analog inputs. There is a digital input, but it's not HDMI and I've never used it. Most digital streaming devices expect HDMI.

The first suggestion I got for this was a Mac Mini. There's some good software for running it through the video system, and I can feed VGA into the TV. Its power draw is low and it could replace the server. But the more I looked into it, the less I liked it:

• it's expensive ($700)
• I'm more familiar with Debian based servers
• I'd need to use external drives to get the storage I'd like

So I'm leaning to a different route. First I'll do a like-for-like replacement of my current server with something that's lower power and SATA-friendly. My current favorite is the HP N36L. The included 160GB drive is laughable (they must have loads of them in warehouse somewhere) but big SATA drives are easy to add.

For video I have a couple of options. One is a PC that I can set up with Boxee - the favorite candidate is an ASUS Eee-Box. However a cheaper option is the one streamer I've found so far that will output to old fashioned analog video - the Seagate GoFlex TV. We could also just stick with hooking up a laptop whenever we need to.

If you feel eager to offer me advice do go ahead and send me an email or tweet. This kind of thing is one of those times I regret not having comments - the comments on Tim Bray's similar thoughts were excellent.

Updates

I got a few useful tweets with suggestions. I haven't thought them through yet, but thought I should at least mention them here.

• Various suggestions for other boxes to handle the video streaming. I just want to stress that Netflix is a necessity so I can't use install my own linux setup for such a machine. I'll either have to go with windows or get a box that's already got the netflix streaming burned in.
• Western Digital also do a video streamer that supports analog outputs.
• I had a couple of suggestions for NAS. The trouble with NAS is that it doesn't do my other server functions, so a low power server that I put drives into seems a better bet.
• Jeff Attwood has been having similar thoughts.
• Assuming I have separate machines for video streaming and other server duties, the other server doesn't need to be that small as it can sit in the basement. Low-power is valuable, but size isn't such a big deal. A bigger case makes it easy to fiddle with and take hard drives.
• The Bubba server seems like a good option as a general server. I'd prefer something that doesn't ship from outside the US.