Media Center PC help needed

[MadMike]

The sad thing is you will pay more for that P3 then you would if you went out and bought a new Core 2 Duo.

So I found out.

I'm looking to build a machine that I can copy my entire DVD collection to and hook up to the TV, so that I'll have all of them readily available instead of having to repeatedly grab and return them to the shelf. Yeah, I know, I'm going to need a shitload of hard drive space, but I don't need a very powerful machine otherwise.

I was wishing I had held onto the Athlon XP 2000 that I gave away to a friend who sorely needed her machine upgraded, but figured I'd be able to get another one like it for cheap. Hmm, Newegg doesn't have anything less than an Athlon 64 these days, so I figured I'd stop by the local shop that has all kinds of stuff, both old and new. I looked at the processor list and saw they had really, really old ones for a few bucks. But to get another one like I had would be around $100. I could get a new low-end processor and motherboard for that. Oh well...

[technical.angel]

Yeah, I know, I'm going to need a shitload of hard drive space, but I don't need a very powerful machine otherwise.

http://www.cdw.com/shop/products/def...spx?EDC=834304 Terabyte drive $360

[Shabo]

If you want to put your dvd collection on your HD, you might want to go with a RAID system. Extra safeguard so if one of the drives crashes, you don't lose all that time you put into ripping the DVDs onto your computer. And I'm not sure I would go with a low end processor to play back movies, unless you have a good amount of RAM with a good mobo that has decent bus speeds and doesn't really have many extra programs on it.

[MadMike]

If you want to put your dvd collection on your HD, you might want to go with a RAID system. Extra safeguard so if one of the drives crashes, you don't lose all that time you put into ripping the DVDs onto your computer. And I'm not sure I would go with a low end processor to play back movies, unless you have a good amount of RAM with a good mobo that has decent bus speeds and doesn't really have many extra programs on it.

I'm probably going to go with an external drive (or more than one, actually. I have a lot of movies.) I don't really know much about RAID arrays, although I did try to read up on them, but ended up more confused than anything.

When I say "low end", it's actually a relative term. The old processor I mentioned previously played them back just fine, and the cheapest new processor I can get these days is faster than that, so I don't think there are any worries there. I think I'm going to put 512MB in the thing. It's going to be used solely for watching movies, not for any gaming, email, or anything else, although at some point I'd like to network the whole collection so I can share it with the other TVs in the house.

I'm pretty broke lately, and have to make sure I have enough for our beach trip, so I'm not buying it anytime soon. I do have a wish list, however. Maybe I could post it when I get home, if you wouldn't mind offering your constructive criticism.

[jb17kx]

Western Digital also do a 1TB 10KRPM external drive...
There was also something a friend showed me, something like an external drive that was already configured as a RAID cluster, and could have more space added as you wanted. Best part is that comes in either IEEE 1393, IDE, or SATA. I'll look it up for you... I think it started at 1TB (so 2TB with no RAID) for around US$700.

The sad thing is you will pay more for that P3 then you would if you went out and bought a new Core 2 Duo.

I've only ever seen two Slot 1 PIIIs. One was a 650MHz that was owned by my school (they were never going to - couldn't - use it, but the admin wouldn'tt let me have it), and the other a 1GHz that was at a flea market for AU$200. Didn't have the dough for it.

Actually, Mike, I'd spec the machine slightly higher than that. I;d want to have plenty of backup umph, and if all this HD media stuff kicks off it can never hurt to have a bit spare. I'd go for:
-- Around a gig of ram (or maybe 768 - two sticks, a 256 and a 512), and fast stuff too, maybe 400MHz DDR2-800 SDRAM.
-- At least 500GB in the hard disk department - a 10000rpm disk would be good idea.
-- A decent processor (dpending on your mobo and chipset) - perhaps a Northwood Pentium 4, or even a superceeded-but-still-available Pentium D? You should also be able to find AMD Althlon XP stuff around, I saw some for sale online in around Februrary...
I'm sure you can go from there - that's probably actually overkill. My mindset is just to build one very good machine that does everything, rather than a few small specialised ones.

[MadMike]

This is my list so far, minus the external drives. I haven't added them yet.

http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/...Number=5920326

If you think I should double the RAM, I can certainly do that. Other than that, what do you think?

I don't know anything about TV cards (I'm also planning to use this machine for recording), so I don't know if the one I picked is any good or not. I already have a wireless LAN card, so I don't need to order one of those.

I'm not too worried about HD media. DVDs are just fine, and if I ever cross that bridge, I can always upgrade later.

[Kilamon]

This is my list so far, minus the external drives. I haven't added them yet.

http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/...Number=5920326

Check out http://www.bigbruin.com/2007/nmedia_1 for a good case that may work better in your HTPC (Home Theater PC). Also, BigBruin has a lot of good information for your HTPC needs. Read up.

You definately need to use RAID. I do NOT recommend external drives. The playback speed will be slowed unless you use an external SATA with SATA plugs. Anything that uses USB or Firewire may suffer performance problems. You'd essentially be buying a sweet ferrari of a hard drive and then putting it on a dirt track. As for RAID, just get 2 drives to begin with and use RAID1 which will mirror your drives so if one of them fails, you have a backup. the BigBruin site has an easy to understand guide on RAID if you're confused.

[MadMike]

Check out http://www.bigbruin.com/2007/nmedia_1 for a good case that may work better in your HTPC (Home Theater PC). Also, BigBruin has a lot of good information for your HTPC needs. Read up.

I actually looked at that same case once before. I had that on the list but removed it when I thought it wouldn't fit on my stand. I must have mis-measured, because I checked it again, and it fits just fine. I might go back to that one now, even though it's a lot more expensive.

You definately need to use RAID. I do NOT recommend external drives. The playback speed will be slowed unless you use an external SATA with SATA plugs. Anything that uses USB or Firewire may suffer performance problems. You'd essentially be buying a sweet ferrari of a hard drive and then putting it on a dirt track. As for RAID, just get 2 drives to begin with and use RAID1 which will mirror your drives so if one of them fails, you have a backup. the BigBruin site has an easy to understand guide on RAID if you're confused.

I'm afraid I'm still lost. Maybe I didn't look at the right document?

I'm going to need more than 2 drives to hold everything. I think I'm going to need about 2 TB to hold all my DVDs. Is it easy to add drives to an array? I've never done anything with that before. I've built and repaired my share of systems, but I'm feeling lost here.

[JustADude]

Quick primer, as a general FYI: RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Independent Disks" or something to that effect. There are a whole bunch of different kinds of options for how that array is set up, numbered 0-5, based on what kind of scheme you use.

What Kilamon is suggesting is a RAID-1 "Mirrored" design. Basically, you get a pair (or, in this case, multiple pairs) of identical physical drives and set them up so the same information is always present on both drives just in case one goes out.

A better method, given how much storage you'll be using, would be the RAID-5 "Block-Interleaved Distributed-Parity" design. Basically you have multiple HDs, at least 3, where they each take turns keeping parity bits for a certain amount of space, so if any of them crap a brick, the info can be recovered easily using a check-sum routine. Also, RAID-5 is actually more space-efficient the more discs you have, since you lose 1/#th of the space on the discs (# being the number of discs in the array), as compared to a flat 1/2 space for a mirrored array.

Its only weakness is the slowdown for parity updates during small write operations, so I'd recommend putting your OS and files that will need updating on a single disc NOT in the RAID-5 and using the multi-TB block of discs only for bulk storage.

[MadMike]

Also, RAID-5 is actually more space-efficient the more discs you have, since you lose 1/#th of the space on the discs (# being the number of discs in the array), as compared to a flat 1/2 space for a mirrored array.

So basically, you lose one of the drives, assuming they're all the same size?

[Andara Bledin]

I'm looking to build a machine that I can copy my entire DVD collection to and hook up to the TV, so that I'll have all of them readily available instead of having to repeatedly grab and return them to the shelf.

I'd just get a DVD jukebox. It'd be less versatile over the long-term, but probably a lot easier to set up and use if you just want to stop shuffling discs.

^-.-^

[myswtghst]

I'd just get a DVD jukebox. It'd be less versatile over the long-term, but probably a lot easier to set up and use if you just want to stop shuffling discs.

^-.-^

My dad has a 100-disc cd player for that purpose.

Granted, my brother built me a handy-dandy little shuttle (it's a little baby computer, with a pretty green case) that is basically only there to store and play movies and tv shows for me. Have I mentioned that my brother rocks?

[JustADude]

So basically, you lose one of the drives, assuming they're all the same size?

Yeah, pretty much. I guess I brain-farted since you lose 1/#th of the space on each drive, not all the space on one particular physical drive. And, like others mentioned, depending on how many DVDs you have, and if you care about special features, you might want to go with a jukebox. Of course, since you estimated a couple TBs of space, I bet you have more than 100 DVDs.


On most cases the external slots come with a blank plate, and can be used for an internal slot, so (depending on if you go with the separate drive for your OS and ripping/playback utilities or not) you'll need a case with either 6x or 7x 3.5" slots total, if you want to do RAID-5 array with over 2-TB of space. Check out the "ATX Media Center" class of cases on Newegg, and you should be able to find something to suit your needs nicely. Not sure on the quality of the brand, but Silverstone has some options that look pretty good, and Thermaltake has an option or two in that category as well.

[MadMike]

Yeah, pretty much. I guess I brain-farted since you lose 1/#th of the space on each drive, not all the space on one particular physical drive. And, like others mentioned, depending on how many DVDs you have, and if you care about special features, you might want to go with a jukebox. Of course, since you estimated a couple TBs of space, I bet you have more than 100 DVDs.

I think I counted about 300 DVDs, and I'm not sure if I counted the ones my wife took up to the bedroom to watch and never brought back. I did a random sampling of about 30 discs, and it looks like the average size is about 6 GB.

As for special features, I'll still get those, because I'm just copying the VIDEO_TS directories, not ripping them into AVI files or anything like that. I've copied a few movies to my main computer's hard drive, accessed them from other computers, both wired and wireless, and even accessed the same movie from more than one computer at once, and everything's been working great so far. I did get a scare one time, though. The playback started skipping all of a sudden, but it turned out that the third party defragmenter I have on my main computer had kicked in.

I also have this cool remote that works with all kinds of different players, and also doubles as a mouse. I've had great luck with that.

I'm still not sure about the whole RAID thing. The drives are a little pricey for having the space of one of them being unusable. Almost makes me want to just take my chances. Besides, I've never had a drive that died instantly (knock on wood.) The last drive that died warned me by giving intermittent errors ("Error writing to drive C"), but still left me plenty of time to get a new drive, slave the old one, and copy everything back before it died completely.

I know someone said that external drives would be too slow, but I've looked around on Newegg, and I saw some positive reviews from people who bought them and used them for the same thing I have in mind. I might see if I can borrow someone's external drive and try it out. That way, if it works, great. If not, then I can look into other options.

[Andara Bledin]

A DVD jukebox would still work with 300+ disks. One of the ones I spotted on a price comparison site was a 400 disk setup for about $500-$800 online and had several good reviews listed.

^-.-^