My build...

[itschris]

So far...

1) Thermaltake Mozart VC4000 Case
2) I'm going to wait to see what the new Radeon 56XX cards are like
3) Hard Drives...

Okay... so I'm trying to educate myself and get caught up on all the new technology. This is drive I'm thinking about:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136284

I was orginally going to go with the Caviar Greed drive thinking lower power=less heat not to mention power savings and all that. However, there definately seems to be a 50/50 love hate with these drives vs a pretty unanimous liking for the Caviar Black drives.

Also, I'm wondering if it's worth having a smaller application drive for Win7, Microsoft Office, and some other softward and just retain the inital 1 drive purely for data.

Thoughts... comments?

 

[jinjuku]

The AMD Athlon X2 4850 Brisbane at 45Watt TPD

The tough part is waiting for a mainboard with integrated 5XXX series Radeon. Supposedly the ATI Radeon HD 5350 Evora Cedar will be intro'd on January 7.

I am thinking this will be the IGP version of the 5K line up. For me it is a waiting game.

I have a dedicated server box and will be running some POE Wireless N access points in the house. One will be dedicated for the HTPC and a 2nd will be for the Data network (laptops and the like). Each will have it's own SSID and encryption key.

Chris, try just putting in a 3 drive NAS or Windows Home server box with a RAID 5. Let that host all central data and just run a quiet drive on the HTPC.

 

[AcuDefTechGuy]

Hitachi 2TB HDD for $155 (free S/H):

http://www.buy.com/prod/hitachi-deskstar-7k2000-2tb-sata-3gb-s-3-5-7200rpm-32mb-desktop/q/loc/101/211236326.html

This Hitachi 1TB HDD is currently out of stock, but since you are waiting for the Radeon 56xx card anway, which won't come out until Jan-Feb 2010, might be considered for only $70 (free S/H):

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B002D5XY8A/ref=pd_luc_mri?_encoding=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&v=glance

 

[itschris]

Hitachi 2TB HDD for $155 (free S/H):

http://www.buy.com/prod/hitachi-deskstar-7k2000-2tb-sata-3gb-s-3-5-7200rpm-32mb-desktop/q/loc/101/211236326.html

This Hitachi 1TB HDD is currently out of stock, but since you are waiting for the Radeon 56xx card anway, which won't come out until Jan-Feb 2010, might be considered for only $70 (free S/H):

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B002D5XY8A/ref=pd_luc_mri?_encoding=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&v=glance

Beyond price, is there any other performance or reliability concerns? I'm just going with what I know from back in the day, and WD was always the drive to have. I don't care one way or the other though. I really did like the idea of the Green low power drives, but everyone says they're slow.

I'm assuming the Hitachi is a fast yet quiet drive? Yes?

 

[AcuDefTechGuy]

I was orginally going to go with the Caviar Green...

Also, I'm wondering if it's worth having a smaller application drive for Win7, Microsoft Office, and some other softward and just retain the inital 1 drive purely for data.

I actually have 2 Caviar Green and they run hot as he!!
I wish I had gotten the Hitachi 2TBs instead, which are 72000 RPM, instead of 5400 RPM!

So forget it.

If you already have a smaller SATA HDD you could use that for just the OS and other apps.

I have two 2TB Caviar Green HDDs. On one of the HDDs, I partitioned a 100GB space just for the OS and applications. The rest is for my blu-ray movies.

If I had just one Hitachi 7200RPM 2TB HDD, I would partition a 100GB space for OS & Apps, and the rest for movie files.

Note: 2TB is actually 1.83TB usable space, not 2.0TB usable space!

So 100GB for OS and 1.73TB for storage.

 

[itschris]

I actually have 2 Caviar Green and they run hot as he!!
I wish I had gotten the Hitachi 2TBs instead, which are 72000 RPM, instead of 5400 RPM!

So forget it.

If you already have a smaller SATA HDD you could use that for just the OS and other apps.

I have two 2TB Caviar Green HDDs. On one of the HDDs, I partitioned a 100GB space just for the OS and applications. The rest is for my blu-ray movies.

If I had just one Hitachi 7200RPM 2TB HDD, I would partition a 100GB space for OS & Apps, and the rest for movie files..

So there's no real advantage to having a seperate physical hard drive for the OS and related apps? That makes things easier. The 2TB Hitachi drive seems like a great deal.

 

[Quickley17]

People are very partial about which drives they choose. It's usually related to whether they have had one fail or not. I have had Seagate ever since I had a WD fail (caveat: it was in a laptop) 6 years ago.

I think you should consider these power requirementsfor 1 TB drives:

WD Caviar Green
Read/Write: 5.4
Idle: 5.4
Standby: 0.4
Sleep: 0.4

WD Caviar Black
Read/Write: 8.4
Idle: 7.8
Standby: 1.0
Sleep: 1.0

Compare that with the 300+ watts that each top-end graphics card might use...

 

[AcuDefTechGuy]

Beyond price, is there any other performance or reliability concerns? I'm just going with what I know from back in the day, and WD was always the drive to have. I don't care one way or the other though. I really did like the idea of the Green low power drives, but everyone says they're slow.

I'm assuming the Hitachi is a fast yet quiet drive? Yes?

I have 4 Hitachi 1TB Deskstar HDDs in my 2nd HTPC, and they seem to be pretty fast and a lot COOLER than my Caviar Green drives. I don't hear a lot of noise from any HDDs from where I sit, but I actually think the Caviar Green is louder.

I think most of the noise will be the CPU fan, GPU (graphics card) fan, and any Chassis/Case fan.

If you use just one HDD (like Hitachi or something else besides Caviar Green), you might not need to replace those little 60mm & 80mm case fans.

This is my experience:

Before I added the 120mm Acoustifan:

The Hitachi HDDs = 45 degrees Celsius after a few hrs - not too bad.
Caviar Green HDDs = 70 degrees Celsius after a few hrs!!!

After the 120mm fan: Caviar Green = 40 degrees C.

 

[GlocksRock]

I've had western digital and seagate drives fail on me, but I would still buy them... I also have a 2 TB hitachi drive which so far seems to be doing very good. Keep an eye on the prices on newegg, they tend to fluctuate often, and sometimes have rebates. As far as multiple drives for the OS and other stuff, it definitely can't hurt to put the OS and software one a separate drive, or at least a diff. partition. If you want a lot of performace look at solid state hard drives, they are pricey but don't have spinning platters so they are less likely to fail, and they are also a lot faster.

 

[Warpdrv]

I am getting ready to build one as a server for my basement for all my streaming needs, and those 2tb drives are just what the doctor ordered.

Hope they are reliable... I'm gunna be shooting for a very large RAID 5 setup... Probably up to 20TB but start off with about 12 and just add on the fly...

 

[jinjuku]

The Samsung Spinpoints run cool and quiet also...

A big HD subsystem improvement you can make is a dedicated drive for the system page file.

 

[itschris]

The Samsung Spinpoints run cool and quiet also...

A big HD subsystem improvement you can make is a dedicated drive for the system page file.

Are you talking about 1 drive for the OS & Apps (or partition) and a seperate physical drive for the page file? Or are you saying just have another partition? In either case... what size?

 

[jinjuku]

Are you talking about 1 drive for the OS & Apps (or partition) and a seperate physical drive for the page file? Or are you saying just have another partition? In either case... what size?

You will want a separate drive. Separate partition is like trading seats on the Titanic.

 

[itschris]

You will want a separate drive. Separate partition is like trading seats on the Titanic.

How does having that on a seperate drive increase performance? How much so?

 

[jinjuku]

How does having that on a seperate drive increase performance? How much so?

If you have one drive doing all the normal stuff like opening/closing files and running executable files, then along comes a huge swap file request, well you are stuck there until the swap operation completes.

The difference is a smoother running system. Done a lot of this with Database servers and even Photoshop and Audio/Video edit workstations where you can't risk the HD performance dropping below a certain threshold.

Any $50 drive will do...

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

Well, WD Black 1tb drive is great choice - its rock solid one of the first in any comparable benchmarks. Samsung F1 are very close, but I'd still get the wd.

Any HD is basically have 50/50 chance to live throght the first month, and If didn't failed - you got pretty good chance to have this drive for a very long time.

You'll want to make sure the drive is always cool, hot running drive = slower speed and shorter lifespan.

The hidden bonus with WD Black 1T - its easy to apply TLER patch, basically turning Black drive into Raid series one - basically optimizing it to use with RAID arrays.

Looks like 5xxx is the way to go, but you don't really need to wait for 53xx as 5750 costs around $130.

Mozart is a pretty big case and you wont have huge issues cooling this card.

But, I think for the money ION/XBMC or Boxee system will beat your setup on value any day

 

[itschris]

If you have one drive doing all the normal stuff like opening/closing files and running executable files, then along comes a huge swap file request, well you are stuck there until the swap operation completes.

The difference is a smoother running system. Done a lot of this with Database servers and even Photoshop and Audio/Video edit workstations where you can't risk the HD performance dropping below a certain threshold.

Any $50 drive will do...

Okay I'll buy that. I can see that being useful in the database server and editing workstations, but would it really make a huge deal in an HTPC?

 

[itschris]

Well, WD Black 1tb drive is great choice - its rock solid one of the first in any comparable benchmarks. Samsung F1 are very close, but I'd still get the wd.

Any HD is basically have 50/50 chance to live throght the first month, and If didn't failed - you got pretty good chance to have this drive for a very long time.

You'll want to make sure the drive is always cool, hot running drive = slower speed and shorter lifespan.

The hidden bonus with WD Black 1T - its easy to apply TLER patch, basically turning Black drive into Raid series one - basically optimizing it to use with RAID arrays.

Looks like 5xxx is the way to go, but you don't really need to wait for 53xx as 5750 costs around $130.

Mozart is a pretty big case and you wont have huge issues cooling this card.

But, I think for the money ION/XBMC or Boxee system will beat your setup on value any day

I really don't know a lot about the XBMC or the Boxee systems. But what I have read raises shortcomings just like any choice. I'm more comfortable in the Microsoft world... perhaps to my detriment, but I believe that their software will continue to get better and they'll end up the juggernaut they usually are in any given arena, but I guess we can debate that all day long in sort of the FORD vs Chevy fashion.

I'm actually waiting for the 56XX cards. They are supposed to be about half the price and still do everything I need them to. I'm not opposed to spending money, just don't want to do it needlessly. If it turns out they're not what they're cracked up to be, I agree with you that the 5750 is a fine choice.

 

[BoredSysAdmin]

I really don't know a lot about the XBMC or the Boxee systems. But what I have read raises shortcomings just like any choice. I'm more comfortable in the Microsoft world... perhaps to my detriment, but I believe that their software will continue to get better and they'll end up the juggernaut they usually are in any given arena, but I guess we can debate that all day long in sort of the FORD vs Chevy fashion.

Nothing wrong with Liking ether domestic brand , but I'm not offering you to go BMW (Linux) ether. Boxee Beta works great on Windows 7 and ION.
I wrote few lines here:
http://forums.audioholics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=61545

p.s: I hope i didn't started car makers flame war here

 

[jinjuku]

Okay I'll buy that. I can see that being useful in the database server and editing workstations, but would it really make a huge deal in an HTPC?

It's been my experience that it makes for smoother system in even everyday use.

The worse that can happen is you spend $50 and have some extra storage.