Building a Vortexbox media server

Last week I happened to wander into the local branch of Maplin and noticed that they were selling a Gigabyte Brix barebone PC system for £69 (reduced from £99). The Brix (along with its Intel equivalent, the NUC) is a tiny but fully functional x64-based computer.

The drop in popularity of optical drives (CD-ROM and DVD-ROM) means that the lower limit on physical size of a PC is no longer determined by the size of the optical drive - because it doesn't have one. The small form factor isn't a limitation on size either. The £69 unit has a dual-core Celeron processor, which is absolutely fine when all you're doing is shoving media files from the hard drive down the network. But these things are also available (at a higher price) with an i3, i5 or i7 processor. It comes with a mounting bracket which allows you to either wall-mount the unit or fit it to the VESA mounting points on the back of your monitor.

I went for the Celeron-powered unit, as it was a. cheap (and still more powerful than I need for Vortexbox) and b. fanless. (The units with more powerful processors require a CPU fan, the Celeron model doesn't.) The only moving part is the hard disk drive. In fact if you fitted an SSD you'd have no moving parts. But terabyte SSDs are still expensive.

So, having picked up a Brix, a 1TB hard drive and a 4GB DDR3 memory module, I set to work:

The first thing to do was open up the Brix. There's a DDR3 SODIMM slot, a combi SATA data and power connector on a flying lead (taped down in the picture below) and a combi Bluetooth/802.11n wireless module:

The wireless module wouldn't be required as I already have a full 802.11n wireless infrastructure. So I decided to remove it, partly to save power and partly so that I could re-use it elsewhere. Keen-eyed readers may have spotted that I'd already removed the screw for the wireless module before taking the photo above.

So with the wireless module safely removed and the SATA flying lead freed up, we're left with this:

The unused wireless module was kept safely for re-use:

This has now been installed into my netbook, an Acer Aspire V5-121. The pre-installed wi-fi card in this only supported 802.11g (54Mbit) not 11n (150Mbit). It also didn't have Bluetooth. The Acer now has both 11n and Bluetooth 4.0. Nothing goes to waste!

The 4GB DDR3 RAM was then installed:

And then the 1TB hard drive connected:

Finally the case was screwed together.  This thing is absolutely tiny. No, it's not as small as a Raspberry Pi, but the Pi is a low-powered ARM-based SoC (System-on-Chip). This is a fully-fledged 64-bit x86 PC. Remember the 1TB hard drive in the photo above is a 2.5" laptop type. The USB ports visible on the case should give a sense of scale. But just to make the point, here's a picture of the completed unit next to its mounting bracket (VESA or wall mount) with a CD to show the scale:

It's smaller than a CD!

So now the moment of truth. Hooking it up and testing it:

Ok, now to power on:

It works!

I won't go through installing Vortexbox as this went pretty much as expected. The only snag I found was that despite following the instructions on the Vortexbox wiki I couldn't create a bootable USB key. So I downloaded an ISO and burnt an install CD instead, and installed Vortexbox using an external USB CD drive.

It's now up and running, and I now have a working media server (separate to the main file server). LMS (formerly Squeezeserver) works, so I've been able to uninstall it from my Windows desktop PC. DLNA file sharing works, so I can stream videos to my TV and blu-ray player. And if I run out of space, eg for videos? There's a USB3 port on the front. I just get an external USB3 hard drive (several terabytes in size) and rip all the blu-ray discs to that.

And all for under £150. Can't be bad.