Media server vs HTPC with large storage

[Mike Garcen]

yeah, i echo the sentiments on why use so many 500gb drives. If you’re buying these brand new, at a minimum they should be 1tb, unless you’re getting some phenomenal deal on the 500’s?

[Taylordown]

[quote=swoon]

Have you considered spoiling yourself with an SSD for your OS drive?

[/quote]

After going over the numbers again, i did decide to go with a 90Gig SSD for the OS and other programs and a 2Tb (6Gb/s) for the tv recording.  the other drives will be 1 Tb as well.  Good call.

 

what do you mean there isnt any HD Audio support when using an xbox as an extender? 

[babgvant]

RAID just shifts the single point of failure from the drive to a controller.  IMO, it’s not worth the added complexity and risk unless going with a much more expensive controller (i.e. no built in or cheap addin cards).  I don’t know how true it is currently, but there was a time when many of the lower end controllers relied on the host CPU for parity calculations and lacked sufficient cache so in some cases it was actually slower than a JBOD config too.  FWIW, I JBOD and use the synctoy to fake folder duplication across spindles. Pretty sure Michael (Mikinho) uses RAID on his system, hopefully he can chime in and maybe provide some perspective from the other side 🙂

I do think fewer, larger drives is the way to go.  Not only is it a better value, but leaves room and capacity for future expansion when you need it (and you can never have too much storage :)).

[swoon]

Do you want HD Audio (DTS-HD MA, Dolby TrueHD, multi-channel LPCM) soundtracks found on Blu-ray to be played back on an Xbox 360?

[DavidStein]

my win7 htpc installation only takes up maybe 25GB so i use a 64GB SSD as the boot drive. you can probably save money there if its just going to be used as an htpc.

also i honestly can’t imagine not buying 2TB drives for your raw storage. the WD green drives are like 80$ as a regular price on newegg

[Taylordown]

[quote=swoon]

Do you want HD Audio (DTS-HD MA, Dolby TrueHD, multi-channel LPCM) soundtracks found on Blu-ray to be played back on an Xbox 360?

[/quote]

In and ideal world I would, but the Xbox would be the extender to a livingroom tv and not the hometheater with the 5.1, so not a necessitty.

Is the i5-2500k overkill for this build if the most taxing thing would be scanning for commercials? Or will an i3 suffice?

[swoon]

[quote=Taylordown]

[quote=swoon]

Do you want HD Audio (DTS-HD MA, Dolby TrueHD, multi-channel LPCM) soundtracks found on Blu-ray to be played back on an Xbox 360?

[/quote]

In and ideal world I would, but the Xbox would be the extender to a livingroom tv and not the hometheater with the 5.1, so not a necessitty.

Is the i5-2500k overkill for this build if the most taxing thing would be scanning for commercials? Or will an i3 suffice?

[/quote]

Just keep in mind, you’ll have to jump through hoops if you are planning to play back BD-based material on the Xbox at all.

Check out some of our reviews with ShowAnalyzer benchmarks to help you decide:

i5-2400s

i3-2100t

i5-2500k

[nightryder21]

One thing to keep in mind if you go with a SSD for your OS… anything recorded by the Centon Tuner card that is marked “Copy Once” will not be able to be copied or transfered into another drive. It will have to stay on your SSD untill you delete it. So if you record a lot of HD channels that mark their content as “Copy Once” an SSD may not be the best choice unless you get a huge and expensive SSD or buy a few cheap ones and put them in RAID.

[swoon]

An SSD is no different than any other drive when thinking about how WMC handles CopyOnce content. You certainly can move those programs around to different drives. The license for those files is retained in the OS that recorded the file which prevents the content from being played back by other PCs. It is generally not recommended to use an SSD as a recording drive. The SSD is best at retaining OS and programs.

[Mike Garcen]

100% accurate aaron, the license is on the system, not the files.

PLUS, even if you have the OS drive as SSD, you can still configure MCE to record TV to a different drive. That’s how i have mine, 80gb SSD with OS, and 1tb HD for recorded TV alone, and it just records directly there.

[Author]

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