Laptop as Music Server - Wear?

FIT PC2

The FIT is so small you can Velcro it to the back of your monitor. Stick a 500GB or 750GB 2.5" laptop drive in it an under full load it only draws about 6 watts.

I put a 30GB OCZ SSD in it as the boot drive. The reason for this is that there are no moving parts which makes it 100% silent while idling and it also generates less heat. My music resides on 2 external 500GB laptop drives; again less heat and noise. Under full load with all three drive "spinning" it draws about 8-9 watts. I've had no problems with it serving 5 simultaneous streams to computers and squeezeboxes around the house. I run it headless and it sits on a shelf above my main PC. I control squeezecenter from my main PC and on the occasional time I need to do maintenance on the OS, I just unplug the monitor and keyboard/mouse from my PC and plug it into the fit.

In the past I used a FlipStart PC as a music server. Again, I had all my music residing on external hard drives. The problem I had with the Flipstart was that the fan it in made a small amount of noise while idling and even more noise while serving music. In addition, I had to keep it in a place where it was assessable to do maintenance. Finally, under full load it drew about 35 watts with all drives spinning.

I was using an MSI Wind Nettop for about 6 months(both the single core and dual core version). The Wind worked fine once I changed the stock fan for a quieter unit. However, under full load it did tend to get a bit noisy. Two reasons for changing to the Fit was the size (think phonebook) and power draw (18 watts under load for single core, 22 watts for dual core). Most people wouldn't think twice about 22 watt power draw but I'm trying to as green as possible. I guesstimate that the Wind was costing about $6 a month to leave on all the time; the Fit cost less than $2. The big advantage the Wind has over the Fit is ram; the Wind can be fitted with up to 2GB and the Fit is limited to 1GB.

One of the Poster above mentioned E-SATA. I've only seen E-SATA on a few top of the line Gaming "Laptops" which are way overkill for a music server. While E-SATA is a lot faster than USB2.0 it's not required for serving music. The one place that you're really going to notice the difference is at backup time. Backing up my music library on my main PC using E-SATA takes under two hours. Backing up using USB2.0 takes 12-14 hours.

It's been a long time since I've seen a laptop computer with a PCI slot. However, many laptops have PCMCIA slots and E-SATA cards are available. A lot of the newer laptops/notebooks are using the smaller Express Card slots which are smaller than PCMCIA. Express Card E-SATA cards are available.