Media PC Help

D

DarkSamurai2003

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jul 16, 2003
Messages
270
Well, I'm going to build a media PC that will host a number of songs, movies, videos and such. A lot of media.

I'm thinking about putting 2, 250 GB hard drives into my media PC for the living room. Do you think that's enough for: movies, music, pictures and television capturing?

I want it to be really reliable and not fail on me, and have all the data erased from a bad sector or something like that.

What are some really well-made harddrives that won't have problems and stuff? Should I go with my motherboards RAID or should I get a RAID card? If I go with a RAID card what card should I get to ensure that I won't get errors or it frying or whatever problems that may occur. Also, the card has to be compatible with Linux hehe. What RAID would be best for my data to be safe.

Lastly, should I go with ATA-100/133 (the motherboard in the media PC only supports to that high) or SATA 150?

OS: Mandriva 2006 PowerPack Linux
Processor: 850 MHz AMD Duron
Motherboard: ABit KT7-Raid

I'm going to be putting my PC behind a subwoofer, maybe about 5-10" away from it. It's a Sony SA-WM500 subwoofer, 150 Watts. It has magnetic shielding, or should --> http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/INT...av_HiFiComponents_Speakers&ProductSKU=SAWM500

You think the vibrations from the subwoofer, or possible magnetism might cause problems? I think I remember SATA cables being unshielded, not sure if they've done that -- sheilding the SATA cables.
 
the HTPC I have is similar. I wanted a place for all of my mpeg4 movies, my music, pictures and recorded TV. I am not sure of what kind of case you have but if it's a half or full tower let me make a recommendation.

http://www.coolerexpress.com/sntblba4saha.html

This is a SATA backplane and it cool becuase when you build out the PC, you can precable for upto 4 sata drives. I have all 4 bays filled with 250gb drives and I am buring through the space quickly. I would have done a raid1 but i needed the space.

M
 
The absolute best way to achieve a quiet living room experience is to have a media server squirreled away in a closet or someplace similar that streams the media to a front end unit. On the front end, you only need to use a single 80GB (Samsung SP P80 is highly recommended), to boot the system host a page file, store apps, etc, and then just pull everything else over the network. It is even possible to boot such a system from a memory card if you really want to strip it down.

If that is not possible, grab some Samsung or Hitachi drives. Seagate is pretty good too if you get one of their drives locked in AAM mode. WD and Maxtor do a good job on idle noise, but their seek noise is still quite obtrusive.

Linux software RAID-5 is an excellent choice for this application. It's really flexible, doesn't require super expensive controllers, and will allow you to scale capacity really well.
 
Yeah, I'm going to get a 20 or 40 GB hard drive for the main system, and then 250 or 300 GB Hard Drives for the storage stuff.

Nice, and with this Raid... If I get an error or a corruption or something, how well does it deal with that? I hear that like Raid-1 or Raid-0 (I'm a newbie to raid) one is fast, the other is a little bit slow but one is real good with errors and stuff.

Should I go with a software raid or a hardware raid?

Also, what's a good RAID card for Linux (Mandriva 2006 PowerPack)?
 
Raid 0 and 1 are mostly for 2 disk setups - there are exceptions, of course, but mostly that's it. Raid 5 is for N-disk (K GB each) setups, where N >= 3, and gives you capacity of (N-1) * K GB. However, the advantage is, if one disk goes out, you still have your data. That's good, and for low-speed media applications, it's almost a perfect match.

Linux software raid 5 is about the best I've seen, and it's almost free. If you have a normal PCI-based machine, a sil3114 4 port sata controller or 2 will give you 4 or 8 disks, and well-supported hardware.

And for your media server, try geexbox. You can boot it over the network with a little work, and it takes a really low-spec box for a frontend - mine is a 400 mHz celeron which plays dvd and divx over network with no stuttering. With the low speed cpu comes higher heat tolerance and less heat generation, so I can run the machine with no fans for an insanely quiet background. I can actually hear what I think is the northbridge squeaking when memory gets accessed, that's how quiet it is :eek:

 
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