Share your Server setup and give the rest of us IDEAS

[AndrueC]

I run SlimServer (actually SqueezeServer 7.5.3) on a FitPC 2. That's a 1GHz Atom with 512MB of RAM running Windows 7. The same box also runs TVersity, FTP Zilla and VPOP3. It can be a little sluggish to administer but thankfully rarely needs my attention.

The computer apparently consumes a maximum of 7 watts and gets slightly warm to the touch when doing real work. When idle it's barely warmer than the shelf it sits on.

Music and video files are on an external 1.5TB drive which spins down when idle.

[castalla]

LMS 7.7.2 on Raspberry Pi (via Squeezeplug), music library on 16gb USB memory stick on Huawei router. Fast and responsive consuming 2 watts.

[pippin]

This is the one I actually use for everyday listening.

It uses a Via C7 based ITX board, today you would probably use an Atom instead. 1GB of RAM, I believe.
The whole thing doesn't have a fan, instead it has a heavy housing, the processor and chipset are cooled through a heat-pipe using the radiators on the sides of the housing.
The HD is a 2,5" Notebook drive. The DVD drive is configured to be used with the CD Player plugin so that you can occasionally listen to a CD on all your Squeezeboxes, I don't rip directly on the server but of course you could.

It's completely silent unless you use the DVD drive, you won't notice it (well, you won't HEAR it), even if you sit right next to it.

Software is Ubuntu server edition.
The good thing is i's linux and an x86 architecture so more or less all plugins run on it and it's definitely fast enough but still absolutely silent.

I was afraid of the hard drive dying of the heat pretty soon but it's running well for 4 years now, I come to believe notebook drives can stand more heat, my MacBook Pro also get's pretty hot at times.

It's a really good server but I probably would not build it this way again, today. The primary reason is that I don't use CDs at all anymore, after 7 or 8 years of music streaming (yes, I had other systems before the Squeezebox) all my CDs are ripped now and I don't really buy new ones but downloads instead so I don't need the CD drive anymore.
But that was the whole idea behind the setup: I wanted an openly accessible CD drive to be able to easily feed CDs into it when I want to play them. This means it had to be in the living room which meant it had to be completely silent which is why I built it this way.

Today I would probably use a small form-factor PC without any drive, attach a dual-drive RAID USB setup and stow all this in a remote location where it doesn't matter that it's not completely silent and ugly and no longer care about it.

But if you still use an occasional CD it's an option although.... again... today I would use a Mac Mini for a similar setup. It's cheaper and more powerful. Yet not as silent.

[banned for life]

I recently migrated from a single core Pentium 4 3.0GHz system with 2GB RAM to a system built around a dual core Xeon E3120 3.16GHz with 4GB. After years of frustration, the speed of the web interface is finally pretty good. Browse album pages with artwork, artist and year displayed that used to take 4-5 seconds to load now only take about 1-1.25 second. Full library scans are scary fast - with SbS 7.5.1 it takes only about 6.5 minutes to do a full clear and rescan of 28,000 files. And a nice thing about the new system is that it's cooler, quieter and requires less energy than the old P4.

From my experience, Vortexbox gives the best GUI performance. My current setup is two VMware workstation VM's. One for in the house an one for remote access. Vortexbox wanted 768Mb to install so I adjusted and then set each VM to 256MB after install.

we downtrodden beg for mercy

banned for life

[Mnyb]

I have used my old P4 desktop as a beginner , i had only one player and tried out the squeezebox experience wo investing in a server .

Then i knocked together a Mini-itx box with a couple of hard drive slots , to power my growing system .

I pondered to upgrade that but realised that a HP microserver was cheaper than any diy option of similar power and chassi with a lot of hard drive slots , so now it is an N36 miroserver .

I used Win-XP Ubuntu and ClarkConnect 4.2 and now ClearOS 6 beta as OS for the server .

The thing is the flexibility you can always start with what you got as a beginner

[jimbobvfr400]

I have my music stored on an old buffalo linkstation NAS.
LMS runs on an O2 Joggler that I have also modified to have an optical out and also use as a player. LMS also serves a 2nd joggler running squeezeplay and a SB radio to give me 3 zones.

I find the joggler runs LMS very well, scanning my relatively small library of approx 10k songs is nice and quick and the Web interface runs nicely. The joggler even runs several plugins and transcodes WMA radio streams and also acts as an airport.

If you're unfamiliar with the Joggler, it's a 7inch touch screen photo frame type device sold by O2 as a household organiser type device. It didn't sell very well and O2 sold them off for 50 quid. Although originally quite limited in functionality its actually a very capable device with an Atom processor and 512 MB of Ram and can run all sorts of stuff including full Linux distributions. My 2 jogglers cost me 70 UKP so a bit of a bargain for a 2 zone SB based server and player system.

Running the right software and with the optical modification its almost like a better Touch capable of running full LMS unlike the crappy tiny LMS on a proper touch. The screen is much better and the lack of IR remote no problem as I control either with the touchscreen, my Android phone or squeezeplay on my laptop.

Sent from my HTC Vision using Tapatalk 2

[chn68b]

I have a HP proliant microserver N36L with 4Gb ram running Windows Home Server 2011. I was running Vortexbox but for some reason it stopped allowing me to connect to mysqueezebox.com, installed WHS 2011 and all now ok.

[w3wilkes]

I run my Squeezebox server on a WHS2011 box with 8GB RAM and also use DriveBender to create a single drive image from multiple hard drives. With multiple physical drives in the pool you can then specify duplication for any or all directories in the DriveBender pool. This give redundancy in the event of a drive failure. For backup I sync the library to 2 other Laptops. I really don't want to ever have to rip my CD's again!