Dmitri's HTPC Project

Hope you all had a great weekend! I spent a little cash this weekend, getting me to a solid point in my project. Saturday I picked up a Western Digital Caviar SE 250GB drive from Circuit City. They had it for $80 after $100 in rebates. With that, the difference between the price difference of the 250 and the 320 became too large to ignore. I also just ordered a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150MCE. Once that comes in I'll start playing with some of the PVR and front end software, so I can decide on the best solution.

Upon reflection I should have been moving this way from the beginning. I was focused on the case because I wanted to start the construction, which is great if I'm building from scratch, but I'm not. I have an existing machine and strong questions about software, including O/S. I said earlier that I had removed Windows MCE from the running, because it wouldn't let you burn DVDs of TV shows it had recorded and lacked some support for maintaining my own DVD library. Cost was also a concern but I hadn't taken a look at the costs of some of the competing front ends. In the end it may be cheaper to go with MCE (since I have to buy an O/S anyway) and pick up seperate software that bridges the gap between what I want and what MCE has, if that is the best solution.

This part should come as no suprise for anyone who'd be building their own PC especially if they are recycling parts. My current PC, the basis for my HTPC, was put together in the spring of 2002. It was shortly after this we began seeing Hard drives over the magical 137GB number. You see 137Gb is the maximum addressable space of a hard drive until 48-bit LBA came along. For my system to acknowledge, say a 250Gb or 320 Gb drive, I need to update the bios and the O/S. The O/S should be taken care of by service pack 1 on Win XP, but the bios is another story. It used to be such a pain to do that sort of thing: dumping things to floppy disk, rebooting, hoping you installed it right and didn't just temporarily turn your computer into a door stop. I started to go through that having it fail to take twice, before seeing that maother board was compatible to a Window's based bios update utilty that A-Bit had created. Some one should have done that like, oh, 8 or 9 years ago! So after a bunch of pointless scrambling my syste should be ready for a new hard drive. I may pick one up today or tomorrow, as well as order a TV tuner card, most likely a Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-150MCE. Then I just need a length of RF cable to disconnect my VCR and run the cable to my tuner card and then I can start playing with PVR software. Yay!!!! BTW, thanks, Mike!

I'm not looking at getting a HD Tuner card until I have an HDTV, which may happen some time next year. One would think I should take a look at the amount of disk space recording an HD program would take. However, in 12 months, HD space increases and prices drop, so if I do proceed that route, I will evaluate my disk space requirements then, not now. I don't lack PCI slots on my machine, so adding additional controller cards and drives isn't a problem, so long as the case has places to put them. If my drive space in the case is limited (which it likely will be) then getting a front end that is aware of network drives will be the way to go. Hopefully the front end would be smart enough to keep a large buffer free on the local disk, write what ever it's writing there, then when finished, move the file to the network drive. Not sure if it would need to be smart enough to copy the file locally from a network drive in order to play, but its ability to acknowledge network drives is important.

Did some more price checking on the 320Gb drives, and found another reputable retailer that carries from for $210, which would only be a $0.66/GB. Slightly more attractive, but not much. I'm considering just getting just one of these drives and see how that space suits me. Unfortunately, I don't know how tempermental RAID can be, should I add a like drive later on.

I've noticed a reoccurring theme for me through out this project: going all out vs. building more of a value oriented system. Obviously no one wants to ripped off but I've noticed that I'm obsessing over some silly things. My girlfriend brought up an interesting point: time is money, and while I enjoy doing this research, truthfully, I am spending time doing it and redoing it when I could be making a decision and getting it on with the building. The purpose of this blog was to keep track of the work I have done so I wouldn't be redoing it, and I haven't been very good at keeping track of that info. That is going to change, and as such you will see a good number more posts in the hopes of beginning to start the build in the next couple of weeks.

Certainly not the be all end all of the articles that are going into formulating my decision, but I wanted to collect a set of articles/reviews of components or software that is swaying my decision one way or another.

Hard drives. How much space to I want for my media? I was originally thinking of going with a pair of 250Gb drives, in a RAID-0 array. I've decided in advance that there will be no critical data in my RAID array, since if either of the two disks fail, all the data is lost. I was considering 250GB drives since they were pretty much at the crest of price/size curve. However I read a really good review on Western Digital's newer 320GB drives at Tom's Hardware Guide, which makes a good argument for the 320's as they run cooler, are quieter and perform better. However $140 for a 250 (or $0.56/GB) vs. $230 for a 320 (or $0.72/GB) is a bit harder to swallow. I'm not going to decide on this one just yet, especially since I'm buying 2 drives. Also of note, there will be a 120Gb WD Special Edition that will be the boot disk, and hold all the software and a copy of non-backup media, like pictures, and save game data for any games I might end up installing. As for why Western Digital, for the last few year they're been consistently producing quality, fast and quiet drives. I've used them, they continue to be well reviewed, and I trust them.

Continuing with Cases, back in late December, AnandTech had a decent HTPC case round up. Silverstone came away the big winner since it was an effective cooler, though a tad louder than the warmer Ahanix. Unfortunately, it doesn't include the more recent Ahanix cases or the other Silverstones. And here I was hoping for a clear-cut winner. Damn :-\.

Note: Only Full ATX Mother board compatable cases are being considered. >

Cases	External 5.25	Internal 5.25	External 3.5	Internal 3.5	Front USB	Front Firewire	VFD	PSU	Colors	Cooling
Ahanix D4	2*C	0?	0?	2	2	1	Yes	350W*@	B,S	1x60mm
Ahanix D5	1*E	0?	0	1	0	0	Yes	300W*@@	B,S	1x60mm
Ahanix MCE601	1*E	0?	1*C	3	2*C	1*C	Yes	350W*@@	B,S	2x60mm
Silverstone LC01	2*C	0	2*C	4	2*C	1*C	No	ATX	B,S	1x80mm
Silverstone LC03	2*C	0	2*C	2	2*C	1*C	No	ATX	B,S	1x60mm 1x80mm
Silverstone LC03V	2*C	0	2*C	2	0	0	Yes	ATX	B,S	1x60mm 1x80mm
Silverstone LC10	1*E	1	0	4	4	1*S	No	ATX	B,S	2x60mm 1x80mm
Silverstone LC10M	1*E	1	0	4	4	1*S	Yes	ATX	B,S	2x60mm 1x80mm
Silverstone LC13	2*C	0	2*C	2	2*C	1*C	No	ATX	B,S	2x60mm 1x92mm
CoolerMaster Cavalier 2	2*C	0	2*C	1	2*C	1*F	no	300*@@	B,S	1x80mm 2x60mm
Silverstone LC14M	2*E	0	0	4	4*S	1*S	Yes	ATX	B/B,S/B	1x92mm 2x60mm

Key: *C - Covered by a door.
*E - Embedded with a custom tray face cover.
*@ - Full ATX PSU, included.
*@@ - Custom PSU, included.

Cases considered, but left off the chart and why:
Ahanix MCE301, MCE302 - Micro ATX
Silverstone LC02 - 220W nonATX PSU, riser cards
Silverstone LC04 - 240W nonATX PSU, riser cards
Silverstone LC05,LC06,LC09,LC11 - Mini-ITX
Silverstone LC07,LC08 - Nano-ITX (?)

Excuse the look, I'm messing with the template. I will give it more time when I have some. The case table isn't complete and I'll be adding a complete set of links.

I've been a fair amount of research intto HTPCs in the past week or so. On the O/S front I mentioned below I'm considering going with Windows MCE 2005. I found the following review: http://htpcnews.com/main.php?id=mce2k5_1, which while giving me alot of great info, but hasn't shown MCE to be the slam dunk I had hoped it to be.

• PVR:
  • Time shifting - Supported.
  • TV schedule - Supported, 2 weeks ahead.
  • Record entire series - Supported.
  • Burning TV shows to DVD - Only their format, not real DVDs. (need 3rd party app to burn normal DVD formats. )

I'll add more features to this list as I continue review how 'plug-ins' work for MCE. Apparently other have created applications that can be used in concert with MCE in order to extend it's functionality to accomplish something new or better. Two other options for PVR are SageTV and BeyondTV. I'll need o read more about these and find some reviews.