Media station PC silencing...

[Alex]

Right, so here's the situation...

I have been donated a 500MHz Celeron PC, wasn't entirely sure what to do with it so Ive decided to use it as a media station in the sitting room, mostly for MP3s but also for DivXs as well if it can cope. Now the thing is that the CPU fan is near silent, the PSU has a temp-sensitive fan and as it'll hardly have anything plugged in should run near silent, the GFx card doesn't have a fan its that old (so no gaming...) and the only thing really thats left is the hard disk.

I was trying to think through the options of how to go about this cheaply. As far as I can think about it, the cheapest options are:

1. Buy a new 40GB hard disk, ~£30-£35
2. Buy a SmartMedia reader, a 256MB smartmedia/compactflash card, do a small linux install on that, and run that ~£40-£45
3. Do a network boot. Free, but requires another computer to be constantly on.

All the media would be stored elsewhere on another computer, and accessed but network anyway, so large storage really isn't necessary. We have another CD player already so that isn't going to be in there, so other than this I can't think of any other noise.

Any suggestions as to the best way of doing this/comments on the methods above? How would you do it?

Any input appreciated,

Alex

[MrFlibble]

You can't get quieter than a Seagate Barracuda IV. It's the choice of the silence enthusiast and has been for a while (check www.storagereview.com and www.silentpcreview.com) however, its not particularly quick by today's standards so can be had for very little money.
I wouldn't bother faffing with smartmedia etc, why restrict yourself to a small amount of space when you can probably buy a 60gig Barracuda for less?
I'd say that's the way to go.