Hi Owl,

Well, I can tell you a little about my server. This is an old PC I had in a closet for some time. I finally realized a need for a RAID server, and I threw it back together. It's an ABIT KT-7 Raid motherboard running an AMD Duron processor at 900 MHz (maybe 1GHz) -- nothing fast... I thought it had more RAM, but it says 256 MB. There are currently 4 drives in there -- ~80 G to run the OS and apps, 500 G for movies and 2x200 G that form a 200 G RAID for stuff I never want to lose.

As for cards and stuff -- this machine only has a network card and a video card because they were not integrated onto the motherboard. No sound card down there yet -- definitely not necessary, but I could use one every now and then in the basement. I don't even have a CD ROM, as I rip from other PCs and send the data to the server over the network. Pretty stripped down.

As to file sizes and such.

First, and quickly, movies: 52 movies in 424 GB. I'm not saving them for posterity or anything, I just haven't got around to watching them yet. Could probably handle another 750 GB for movie storage.

Second, music:

Example of a couple songs:
WAV: FLAC: Time: Ratio:
65,981 40,625 6:21 61.6%
44,790 32,165 4:18 71.8%

That's in line with what I usually think I'm getting from FLAC -- compression to about 65% of the original. FLAC rates its compression levels from 0 to 8, and I was using 6. I read, and my quick tests confirmed, that using more compression than FLAC's level 6 wasn't getting much more compression (but taking more processor power and time).

So, I'm using a total of 131 GB (141,133,414,400 Bytes) to hold all my music. According to Winamp, there are:

248 artists
464 albums
4860 tracks

I imagine that there are a handful of mp3s out there, but 99%+ of that data is FLAC. The track count is probably the most important number.

Some examples of CDs ripped and sizes:

404 MB Overseer/Wreckage
275 MB Peter Gabriel/So
243 MB Paul Simon/Graceland
276 MB The Sundays/Static & Silence
446 MB Zero 7/Simple Things

Fun discussion...

-- Otto