$200 high performance media server?

Have you tried playing two pieces of media at the same time form one of the popular NAS boxes you can buy for $150-$200? Don’t bother if you haven’t. They are pretty much maxed out with one user playing media.  But,  you don’t have to settle for lackluster performance because of  your Tightwad budget.

Here’s the idea: Get an last gen, refurb, industrial strength server and pop in a bigger hard drive. Sounds good, but where do you find one? Look no further. Tightwad affiliate Geeks has a Dell Power Edge with a 3GHz CPU and 4GB of memory. Replace its whimpy 80GB hard drive with a new 1TB drive someone always has on sale for around $80. Add your favorite Linux media server software and you’ll blow away the performance of any of those little NAS boxes you’ll find for about the same money in the stores.

Dell PowerEdge 850 Pentium D 830 3.0GHz 4GB 80GB 1U Server w/Video & Dual GbLAN - No Operating System Satisfy your network serving demands for less with this Dell PowerEdge 850 1U Server!This Dell PowerEdge 850 features an Intel Pentium D 830 3.0 GHz processor and 4 GB DDR2 memory (expandable up to 8 GB). Save your data files on the roomy 80 GB SATA hard drive. Dual embedded Broadcom Dual 5721J Gigabit NICs allow you to connect to a high speed network. For a variety of non-mission-critical applications, such as an edge-of-network web and remote location server support, the PowerEdge 850 offers standard server functionality at a very affordable price! Order today!