Here comes the Baby Monster

Yesterday, our brand new media server box arrived. Well, it’s not a media server yet, but it will become one very soon. We already had a “server” in the house. It was called “Monster” due to it’s size, but it’s around 6 years old and really starting to show it’s age, so a new box had to take it’s place.

The new server costs around £150. Yes, that’s £150! It’s an HP ProLiant Microserver G7 Turion II Neo from Dabs which retails for around £250. But there’s a £100 cashback offer if purchased and delivered before the end of August, bringing the price down to £150. I’ve also purchased a VTX3D 1GB Radeon HD 5450 for under £25 to give me HDMI output to hook the box straight up to the TV. The Microserver has 4 SATA drivebays and with 2Tb disks costing under £80, I’ll be adding more storage in the future to put my media collection on it. The box has been christened BabyMonster because of it’s size and because it still needs to grow into a bigger beast 😉

The box seems to have a massive following with lots of information on various forums on how to set it up as a media server or as a RAIDed NAS box for your network. I’m planning to go down the XBMC route which seems to be able to handle local media as well as streamed media from the web. I’ll let you know how that goes 😉

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