vxspiritxv's five room media center server

vxspiritxv

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Feb 10, 2001
Messages
1,610
Ok so I've had a media center pc for about a year with an ATI OCUR. When the ceton cards came out I had a pre-order in for a good 7 months, when I finally got it, life was awesome. Then I had some friends move in. Things started to glitch. Dreaded "Network Issue" popups and random times movie artwork wouldn't load. It was just stressing a q6600 with non raid hard drives. 3tb of media might have been just a bit too much for it.
So with the 2011 tax refund in hand, off I went to many sites to build a new box. First I went to ipcdirect.net to get the case and 120mm fan bracket. Wanted a quiet system and as far as I could tell this was the only site selling the fan bracket, bought the case from them as well because I didn't want a problem with version incompatibilities.
Next I hit up CDW for 5 Hitachi 2tb drives, the LSI 9260-16i, 600mm 3ware SAS cables, battery, and (a week later) battery cable.
When the drives arrived, I almost shit myself with the way the box looked.
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Turns out the drives survived.
Day or two later, LSI card showed up and the battery.
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Love the manual, shows a cable to hook it up, sold separately, joy get to spend another $40 and wait.

From newegg:
Supermicro c7x58 Motherboard
3 x 8GB RipJaw Memory kits (newegg had a deal on them, $240 for 24gb ram!)
Slimline dvdrom
850watt SeaSonic power supply
Norco reverse breakout cable

From SVC:
Gelid 120mm and 80mm pwm fans

Sourced the i7 950 from microcenter for $200.
Amazon for the SATA to SLIMLINE converter.

And used a 150gb 2.5 raptor from the previous system as boot drive.
After using the box for a week, I felt it needed more speed. The tv guide took ~4-5seconds to load. Just felt slow. So then I installed an app called SuperCache from SuperSpeed, ya it made it the speed I wanted, but little did I know it was corrupting my files! Took about 3 hours to realize something was wrong, but had to go eat, came back, none of the extenders would connect.
That was a bad night, ~7 hours later I had to be on a plane to kauai. So broke the news to the roommates, have to use the downstairs dvr to watch TV for a week, until I got back.

Well during the time I was in kauai, I decided I was going to buy (from newegg) a SSD for the boot device and add a pair of seagate SAS 1tb drives (raid 0) for tv recordings/live buffer space. This worked out very well, system is now fast enough I no longer feel it needs more power.

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Yes the battery is ziptied to the ATX connector.

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Eventually I will mount it in the rack.

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Just one of the five xboxes:

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Network is 100% wired and for the most part, in wall. Main switch is procurve 1810 where I used LACP and bonded the ethernet connections.
In my next post I will put up benchmarks and what tweaks I have done. As well as MCE screenshots.
 
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[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management]
"LargeSystemCache"=dword:00000001
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\FileSystem]
"NtfsMemoryUsage"=dword:00000002

Virtual memory turned OFF
Powercfg -h off

Along with LACP bonding the network cards, everything else was left alone.
Many people will say to mess with indexing, I think MCE uses indexing, so didn't touch it.

C: OCZ SSD
c_atto.gif

c_cdm.gif

D: 10TB Raid 5
d_atto.gif

d_cdm.gif

K: 2TB Raid 0
k_atto.gif

k_cdm.gif


MCE, with MediaBrowser (CoverArt, IBN People Provider, MediaInfor Provider) and MyChannelLogos
mce1.jpg

mce2.jpg

mce3.jpg
 
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so you are having good success with Xbox360s as extenders for mediabrowser...

do you have all your movies in a native filetypes or are you transcoding on the fly to feed the xboxs?

I have a dedicated HTPC with a SSD bootdrive and it was the best purchase (other than the ceton card) i have made for my HTPC.

it has a AII 2.4ghz cpu with 2GB of RAM and a 30gb supertalent cheap and old SSD and the thing feels fast as hell, no guide lag time or waiting for pictures to load in mediabrowser or MM.

looks nice, CDW for HDDs..... wasnt that super expensive?
 
I have access to business account manager at cdw, got things cheaper than website prices.

dvdshrink & dvd2mpeg for all the rips
 
What i am missing is the disk setup for the 10TB raid 5 array,
how many disks are involved in that array ?
speeds are incredeble
 
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