Thinking of changing my digital DJ set-up. Currently I have a LAN PC running DJ software with the music contained within the DJ machine and from a plug in USB hard disk too.

Thinking of setting up a dedicated spare PC as a music server in the office, and having ALL my music files in one place on one drive, and using the DJ box PC just to pull the music from the music server in the office via standard ethernet LAN. Am just wondering if the speed of standard ethernet will be fine for continuous pulling music from another PC, whilst also using the DJ machine for internet access too? The DJ box already is connected via LAN cable to the ASDL router in the office, so no cabling to do.

reason for doing it this way is so I can maintain the music database easily from the office without running the DJ box PC, because the DJ box is not the best space for working in except for DJ purposes. Currently I have to keep taking the DJ machine downstairs every time I want to update the music database or edit some playlists.

I have heard of one nightclub which runs a central music server PC and have 4 or more separate DJ PC's in all the different club rooms all pulling music from the server via LAN, so I imagine there are no issues with this?

One issue too, the DJ PC runs Windows XP and the machine I want to use a music server is on Windows 7 RC at the present time....I assume they wont have any networking issues via LAN? Or is it best to keep the same OS on both machines....

Sounds like a good idea. Keeping the music server in one place, on a UPS with some form of backup means it's safer.

You could then hook anything up to it to stream the music, even a cheap XBOX running Xbox Media Centre.

I do the above and never had a problem with speed.

I would buy a cheap UPS, and look at storing your music on a RAID array with two discs mirroring each other - that way if the worst should happen and one of your drives breaksdown, you can carry on playing music.

Should be no problem with streaming music over the network, we have no problem with numerous machines streaming fullscreen video from one server.

it won't be a problem. there's no way you're going to flood a 100Mbps network just by streaming music and general browsing of the web. just make sure that your network cards are set to 100Mbps Full Duplex in your DJ PC and the server PC. don't leave them set to auto-negotiate. if you wanted, you could buy 1Gbps network cards for each machine, but you'd have to check your router could support that speed as well (otherwise it would be pointless)

The OS makes no odds whatsover

as someone else said, you could use disk mirroring, but you'll need a raid controller in your server PC but it sounds like it's just another standard PC acting as a server in a different office so i doubt you'll have that. obviously, make sure you've got your music backed up

it should work fine mate

Yes, it's worth mentioning you can't mirror disks with Windows XP.

You could run a batch copy every night to back up any changed or added files though. I do this with Microsoft's free ROBOCOPY.

I note in Win XP disk management you can SPAN separate disks/volumes to create bigger single storage areas......does anyone think this is a good idea, I dont NEED that amount of space yet, but I just noticed you can do it.......

If you don't need the space, I'd recommend against it. When spanning, if either drive fails, you lose access to both drives.