Media Center PC help needed

[MadMike]

Otherwise, everything looks great, but you can plug 2 IDE devices into one connector, since they have the 'master' device 'slave' device thing.

I know, but I heard that it can cause problems if you try to mix and match like that (hard drives and optical drives.)

Thanks for all your help. I'm hoping to be able to place the orders soon.

[JustADude]

I believe the board I picked only has one IDE connector, which the DVD drive will need, so I think I'm going to have to stick with SATA.

Does everything else look OK?

Otherwise, everything looks great, but you can plug 2 IDE devices into one connector, since they have the 'master' device 'slave' device thing. Don't ask me how that works since they had jumperless setup on drives by the time I got on the scene, but you plug one into a connector in the middle of the cable and one into the end.

[MadMike]

You're right -- I went back and checked, and it does come with a CD, not a floppy. I'll think about whether or not I want to keep the floppy drive, and if I want to go with a smaller hard drive.

I don't really need a card reader on the server. I already have one on the main computer, and if I want to put anything on the server from a card, I can just use a shared folder.

I believe the board I picked only has one IDE connector, which the DVD drive will need, so I think I'm going to have to stick with SATA.

Does everything else look OK?

[JustADude]

They're usually on CD these days, MadMike, and you could get by with a tiny little IDE drive, like about 40 GB or 80 GB if you wanted, since JUST the OS and critical apps are going there.

If you do want a floppy, go ahead and spring for the ones that do the memory-device reading as well. It's a couple bucks extra, but you'll get your money's worth out of it if you (like I) have a phone with a MicroSD memory card or use digital cameras. Stick it in your tower and use your tower's current floppy for the server.

[MadMike]

OK, I finished putting together a parts list for the server. If anyone would care to check it out...

http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/...Number=4575345

I'm starting out with 5 drives for now. I can add up to 3 more with this card if I need it.

The 160GB drive is the one that's not part of the array. I figured I wouldn't need that one to be very big.

I also assumed I'd need a floppy drive, since most of the cards I looked at come with a driver disk.

[LostMyMind]

That depends on the RAID card. Some card requires same sizes and even models. Others don't care.

[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.

[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.

[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]

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?

[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 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.

[MadMike]

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

[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]

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.