TheaterBlog: 8 x 1TB Drives Arrive for the HTPC
by Anand Lal Shimpi on February 4, 2008 3:15 PM EST- Posted in
- Anand
I've started acquiring parts for the HTPC that I'll use in the theater. I haven't finalized the specs of the HTPC so right now I'm focusing on storage. Next up, I need to find a case.
The drives are Western Digital's Green CE drives, the WD10EVCS and have a 1TB capacity per drive. Peak performance isn't really a concern, I'm more interested in keeping power consumption and noise to a minimum - thus the WD drives were worth a try.
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gkresic - Tuesday, February 19, 2008 - link
Before you start configuring your HTPC, allow me some hopefully useful spam: www.htpchouse.com - tutorial for somehow different Home Theater PC setup.Any feedback will be appreciated :)
strikeback03 - Wednesday, February 6, 2008 - link
Does that mean you got a discount?anand1231 - Tuesday, February 5, 2008 - link
Anyone know if you can get a tuner that will take a cable card? Also does the PC upscale all those analog channels?dvinnen - Monday, February 4, 2008 - link
That's alot of storage. What kind of raid are you using?ltfields - Monday, February 4, 2008 - link
Either RAID 5 or possibly RAID 10 sets I would assume. With that much data, you would want some kind of fault tolerance. You'd get more capacity out of RAID 5, but if you have a failure, your restripe time is going to be sizable. Anand, I'll be very interested in what hardware you pick out for the HTPC, especially the tuners. You should do an article in addition to any blog entries on it...Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, February 5, 2008 - link
I'm most definitely going to build a RAID array out of these things. I was leaning towards RAID 5 or RAID 6 to keep capacity/fault tolerance high, RAID 10 gets really inefficient with space quickly and I don't really need the write performance.My hands are pretty much tied for tuners - I may give OCUR another try but I'm not sure how much TV I'll be watching in there to begin with. Although the idea of doing the weekly 24 gathering in the theater sounds pretty good to me now :)
I will be doing a complete article on the whole thing once it's done. Who knows how long that'll be though :)
-A
dlasher - Tuesday, February 5, 2008 - link
HD Homerun: http://www.silicondust.com/wiki/products/hdhomerun">http://www.silicondust.com/wiki/products/hdhomerun
no slot / bus / driver / IRQ / sharing issues. connect ethernet, configure in your software-based-PVR of choice, and off you run.
dlasher - Monday, February 4, 2008 - link
There's a company called "California PC Products" that make some killer cases.
I own several of these : http://www.calpc.com/catalog/8u-13bay.html">http://www.calpc.com/catalog/8u-13bay.html
Combine that with a 3ware/generic 4:3 or 5:3 hot-swap SATA enclosure (you can put 3 of those in the bottom section) and you can put 12-15 drives in hot swap enclosures in the bottom.
Very roomy inside the case, lots of room for cables, fans, etc, easy to make clean. Well vented, stays room-temp inside.
Yes, it's a little big (8U) but since it's going in a rack, out of sight, in your theater rack (where mine is) you don't care.
ltfields - Monday, February 4, 2008 - link
Not a bad case, light on details though.