This morning I was cruising the net reading the news and had some music from musicmatch radio service playing on the speakers. My wife comes down from sleeping-in and bust my chops and gets real sarcastic about how the music selection is awesome in the office but the multi-thousand dollar entertainment system hasn’t had a CD stuck in it for a couple of years. hardly She then puts me to task to fixing that.
Well I have quite honestly been putting off building my own computerized entertainment system. I had a laptop in the closet that was collecting dust and went to dig it out. Fear set in when I ran it up and Windows ME slapped me in the face after applying the patches and paying for a virus checker update I got busy. After a couple of hours of removing all of the crap from it including installing a older copy of PCAnywhere and getting a WiFi card loaded that works with ME. I was all set to start installing programs that I would use to transform this older laptop into a media distribution system.
After much experimentation and loading a half a dozen programs and finding a place to hide the thing wiring it in I was happy to see a good WiFi signal I was all set. I have it playing music from the mapped drive on the server and streaming audio with hotlinks to all of my favorite radio station in the mainland. I have even played some home videos that I had digitized on the server. All the while the video and audio from it is piped around the house thru the home entertainment system. The WiFi WAP is getting a heavy workout but that’s what technology is all about.
The wife who is not a techie is pretty happy and I had fun doing it. Who said older hardware is only good at collecting dust.
Chuck, you probably should mirror the drive contents to another drive (that could be slower but just as big). At that much space you have used there, there is no cheaper alternative. I mean, not with a dedicated RAID chip but a scheduled copy/sync script.