RAID and home servers

[blk03MitsuES]

might think i should split the thread in two but they both relate. . . .

at home i got 3 computers so far, 2 laptops and a normal desktop pc. all 3 use wireless cards to access the net. one of the laptops is somewhat new, uses vista. i dont use it much cus it was a pain in the butt transfering some files from the other comps to the new one. not even half done yet. and so i've been reading here a little about servers. most of the time the threads are about using pc as servers to run either websites or game servers. and tend to use some software to run some server functions. before i had 2 desktops and simply had them hooked up to a router, not wireless thou, to transfer files from each other. worked like a charm. pretty fast too, i didnt experience any lag when it came to watching music videos or listening to mp3s.
i noticed that on the 3 computers i had the same files, same mp3's same music vids, same photoshop files.....
so question, i can simply just turn my desktop into a kind of fake server by just making a wireless network that connects the 3 pcs and storing everything there. right? i said fake server cus i wouldnt be running any actual server functions........or do i get any benefits out of making it an actual server, meaning running server software or what not? all i would pretty much stream would be average size mp3s, mpegs ranging from 40 mbs to 700mbs, and image files ranging in the 20 mbs.

should i keep my laptops connected directly to the internet router or make them connect to the internet from the desktop?

wired or wireless? what will have the fastest transfer speeds for streaming? there's cat5 already wired in my house, all i need to do is connect the main cables from the rooms into a router in the main panel to have the computers networked.

now for the raid question. desktop pc does not support sata drives which dont matter cus i need a pci raid controller right? should i really look into having the HDDs in raid or would i be just fine with multiple hard drives? like having one for mp3s, one for mpegs and last one for image files?

my ultimate goal is to have less junk on my laptops by having just a copy of a file that can be accessed from either laptop.....

[Airbozo]

OK,, First what you are proposing is not really a server, rather a shared drive. You can go into windows explorer, create a directory, right click on the directory and share it. All other computers in your network will now "see" that directory and any file you put in it, in their Network Connections directory. Plus you can map that folder as a drive that gets connected automatically when you fire up windows.

Use the router as the main point of traffic. Don't offload this to your PC. The router is specifically designed for this function.

Wired always is faster. Right now anyway.

You can do raid without an add on card so long as your motherboard supports it. The raid that is available on the motherboard is "software" raid. All functions as to how/where/why data is sent to the drives must _first_ be handled by software. Depending on the complexity of the raid subsystem this could put a load on the PC. Raid cards come in two flavors; "software" and "hardware" raid. The hardware raid card is usually expensive since it has onboard memory, buffers and some of the control logic that takes the process of running raid volumes OFF of the PC. The software raid card can usually be had for pretty cheap but relies on software running on your PC to direct data and monitor the HD's

OK now that that is out of the way, You probably don't need any raid systems to just stream music and videos over your local network, _unless_ all the computers in the house are trying to access the same data stream from the drives. I say test it first with a single drive broken into separate partitions for each data type (MP3's, Movies, Pictures, etc). Breaking it into different partitions can help in case of a disk going bad. Rarely will a dying drive corrupt data in separate partitions. Your mileage may vary though.

[NuKS]

One downside to sharing the drive or folder is the fact that you have to have that computer on all the time in order for other pc's in your home network to acces them. One other solution is to buy a network attached storage device which would hook into your router and be able to share the files with all your computers. I believe you can get some that come with harddrives already in them, but the ones I have seen you can install them yourself. I have been planning on doing this since my wife takes a LOT of pictures of our son (he's almost 1 year old) and she has so far taken up over 15G of space on one of my harddrives. Not sure how much is on the notebook right now.
One downside is the fact that you will have to move all of the files over to that harddrive.
As far as RAID goes, I don't see you needing any RAID arrays, unless you are wanting to go for redundancy, as in a RAID-1 setup. Really if you were looking at the RAID array as a way of organizing and sharing your mp3's, etc. I think your best bet would be to either share a drive, or as I suggested, get a NAS device.
I hope this information helps.