Media Center PC help needed

[JustADude]

I think it had 10 SATA connectors. How do I know which ones can be used for the array?

If it works like the board I have they ALL can. The controller looks at all the SATA drives plugged into the board and says "Hey, which ones do you want to hook up and how?"

[MadMike]

Thanks. I'll see if I can put together a parts list for the server, and let you and anyone else who may be knowledgeable have a look.

[MadMike]

I was looking at this board, and I thought it looked good. It has 10 SATA connectors, and I figured that would be enough, with a few to spare, just in case.

But then I saw something in one of the reviews that said it actually has 2 RAID controllers, 6 on the one and 4 on the other. Is there a way to use all of them for one, or no?

Things are getting a little confusing here. Would I maybe be better of getting just a basic board and a RAID card?

[JustADude]

I was looking at this board, and I thought it looked good. It has 10 SATA connectors, and I figured that would be enough, with a few to spare, just in case.

But then I saw something in one of the reviews that said it actually has 2 RAID controllers, 6 on the one and 4 on the other. Is there a way to use all of them for one, or no?

Things are getting a little confusing here. Would I maybe be better of getting just a basic board and a RAID card?

Not sure, since I don't have experience with Gigabyte parts, but I wouldn't think so. If you want to do more than 6 drives (which would be either 2.5TB or 5TB after losing one for the RAID checksum) you'd be best off to go ahead and get a separate PCI card to do array.

[MadMike]

Thanks, I'll start looking at RAID cards.

A couple more questions, if you don't mind. And anyone else who can help is free to jump in as well.

Going back to the media center PC, would there be anything wrong with using onboard sound? The only reason I went with a card at all is because I want to connect to my stereo's optical connector. However, I've found a board that I think will work with the processor I picked, and also has a built-in optical connector. It also seems to have some better reviews than the original one I picked. Most of the cons are about things I don't intend to do, like overclocking.

Here is the board: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813135208

I'm not going to change my wish list just yet until I'm sure this one would be OK.


And another question: Since I'm not going to be using the server for anything intense graphics-wise, would it be OK to get a board with onboard video and use that, or would that eat up too much memory? I'm hoping to put together a list for that soon.

Oh, FYI, I think I'm going to get 750GB drives for that. It sucks that it's twice what the 500GB drives cost, but I want to make sure I have enough capacity, and the terrabyte drives are still around $400, and last time I checked, they're only allowing one per customer.

[JustADude]

Nah, for just straight playback you should be fine with on-board graphics and sound, if the thing comes with its own D-Audio jack. You might want to consider looking at some of the HD cards, though, to see if you can't get one that will do some really fancy audio- and video-out stuff for your TV in one package.

[MadMike]

OK, I think I'm going to switch the motherboard, drop the sound card, and switch to a SATA drive since the new board only has one IDE connector.

My TV is S-video, so unless there's a board with one of those built in, I'm going to have to go with a video card.

Thanks for all your help so far. Hopefully I won't need much more.

[RichS]

I was just going to say that the ECS motherboard is probably better than the Jetway, & just make sure that the MediaPortal software works with the onboard sound. If it does, you should be all set!

EDIT: Just went to the MediaPortal site, and the only recommended hardware is TV cards, so you should be OK with the onboard audio.

[MadMike]

Yeah, I've been playing around with MediaPortal on two computers, both of which have onboard sound. Nice piece of software.

[MadMike]

OK, I made the changes, and good thing I went back and double-checked because this board takes a different type of memory than the other one did. Good news is, it was about $20 cheaper.

If anyone wants to take another look and make sure everything looks OK, I'd appreciate it. I'm going to go ahead and see if I can put together a server.

[RichS]

Looks OK to me.

Sounds like MediaPortal might be a better solution than what I have - 1) it doesn't look like it has the DRM that Microsoft puts into MCE, 2) unlike MediaPortal, MCE has very specific hardware (graphics, TV, & sound cards) & DVD decoder requirements, and 3) MCE records in Microsoft's dvr_ms file format instead of a straight MPEG-2 format.

When I can upgrade my HTPC (I'm looking into making it quieter with less & larger, slower rotating cooling fans), I'll definitely be looking into it.

[MadMike]

OK, I'm looking at RAID cards now.

I had my eye on some that could handle 12 drives, but they're hellishly expensive. And some of them don't even have cables. They have what they call "Multilane" connectors, which I can't find anywhere on Newegg. I googled around for them, and it looks like even the cables are expensive. The cheapest RAID card I could find that had regular cables was almost $700.

I dropped down to cards with 8 connectors, which should be plenty if I'm using 750GB drives. I probably won't get that many drives to begin with, but I'll be able to add on as needed.

I've been looking at this and this.

They're both made by the same company, and only $10 difference in price. The first one is PCI-E, and the other one is PCI-X, which I'm not familiar with. I did some research, and it says that a PCI-X will fit in a standard PCI slot, but it sounds like it will run slower. I haven't seen any boards on Newegg that have anything called a PCI-X slot, so I'm a little confused here.

I'm a little concerned about the first card, as some of the reviews say that running a RAID-5 with more than 4 drives will slow things down. I've seen similar comments with the second card, but they say that only write operations are slow, so maybe that's what they mean with the first card as well. Since there aren't going to be a whole lot of write operations to the array, that really wouldn't be a problem.

Any ideas here?

[JustADude]

I'd go ahead and go with the PCI-E card, since it's the fastest standard out there. The other one, the PCI bus would be a bottle-neck on your transfers.

[MadMike]

Thanks. I should be able to go from here. Hopefully, the next post I make here will be to post the parts list for the server.

[Shabo]

Ok, make sure that as you expand your drive collection, you expand with the same size and model of HDD that you have in there already. Apparently this is a requirement for raid controllers.