Dmitri's HTPC Project
Dmitri Lenna's log of his attempt to build a Home Theater PC or Media PC as it's sometimes called. He plans to describe all the steps he takes, both sucessful and not so successful, so that ohers may learn from his experiences.
Collection of useful reviews. | Monday, March 14, 2005 |
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 :-\.
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 :-\.
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