Tera firma

[greatbear]

The folks at newegg.com must like me (hell, I've made them quite rich lately). Even though I pick the standard three day shipping, the stuff usually comes in a day or two. This time was a pair of 750 gig Seagate SATA drives and a pair of WD Raptor X 10,000rpm 150 giggers. The Seagates are headed for the home theater PC and the 500 gig drive already there. The HTPC now has a big fat two terabytes of available disk space. It's a Tivo on steroids now. Hey, all that HDTV programming eats up drive space. It will also be it's own media server/jukebox as well. With all the DVDs being released with annoying ads and such that cannot normally be bypassed, they will instead be ripped and contained on the drives. With the ripping also comes a relinquishing of remote control restrictions shoved on me by the studios. Woot.

The Raptor X drives will be going into The PC That Never Was. Late last year I began collecting parts to build a replacment for my troublesome studio PC. Once I had enough stuff for the thing to make it bootable I discovered that it will only run for anywhere from a few minutes to a couple hours before locking up. With springtime in full swing and projects having to be tended to, I put it on the side. Later, when Mom found out about her terminal cancer, I took some time to troubleshoot it and determined the mobo was bad. I didnt work on it, rather I spent all my available time taking care of Mom. Now, in order to keep my mind from imploding I am updating the thing with a new mobo, Athlon X2 4600 AM2 proc, two gigs of DDR800 RAM, with everything else from the 'old' system staying. The box ended up sitting around in a non-functional state so long that it technically became obsolete. The new pieces will give me a decent upgrade path in the future, and what remains of the functional removed parts will become part of an upgrade to the shared 'family' PC. All this boxen flogging is being done to have some decent working machines. Right now the only good PCs are the HTPC and the 7 year old server. Everything else is screwed up in some way.

After all these 'upstairs' PCs get built, fixed and bought, then a new server gets put together. The old one has been almost too faithful though.

I'm such a geek.

Comments

[theoctothorpe.livejournal.com]

Sounds like a fun project. I've heard mixed reviews of those 750giggers .. .Those are the ones with the new perpendicular bits, yes? Some have had problems with reliability, but it sounds as though you're not putting anything on them that isn't nuke-able.

Question about db though... How loud is that rig? Does the sound really "matter" to you? I know a lot of HTPC folk who don't even have fans in their boxes, but I think that they're just being silly (hell, the sound of the DVD player is going to be louder than the average PC fan).

And what OS are you running on the HTPC?

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Yep, this is the new Barracuda 10 series with perpendicular recording. I have heard of issues with them, but reviews have been mostly positive. People complain about the heat given off, but in my setup I have a pair of 80mm fans keeping drives cool. Even with the relatively low airflow from the slow speed fans below, the drive barely gets lukewarm. I plan on having everything backed up automatically from the 'library' drives' just in case. Seagate warranties the drives for 5 years, so that's promising. I have a pair of Seagate Momentus 2.5" 160 gig drives in a pair of Firewire/USB enclosures. Those also use perpendicular recording, and been doing fine so far (these are used for backup and file transport)

I built the rig in a SilverStone La Scala LC-18 case with a built-in touchscreen LCD. I dug around for some very quiet fans, the aforementioned fans are inside the case and take air from below. I picked up a pair of 'smart' thermal sensing fans for the rear (80mm) which run very slow until heat levels rise. I replaced the stock noisy AMD cooler with a big Coolermaster quad heatpipe copper heatsink with a 92mm fan. This, along with the rear fans are also controlled by the mobo thermal management setup. The CPU fan is inaudible. The only noisemaker in normal operation in the power supply fan. I have a PC Power and Cooling 510 watt SLI rated supply which has a thermally modulated fan, but when it picks up speed, it's noticeable, but not hugely loud most of the time. The Video card (ATI All In Wonder X1900) has a big heatsink/fan which is thermally controlled. Run something like 3DMark for a while and that beast kicks up and sounds a bit loud, but it soon winds down when back to idle. This box was put together with the idea of playing games on it now and then. Doom 3 would completely rock on a 50 inch plasma.

I will change out the fan in the PS one day, but there is no hurry. The PC will eventually be inside a cabinet which will mute it quite a bit.

I have Win XP Pro SP2 on the box right now. I have MCE, but might instead frontend what I have now with Meedio or the developing MythTV Windoze port.

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

Yes you are such a geek.

Can you tell me why FireFox sometimes dumps for no apparent reason and for a while it never used to do this.

I run WinXP with SP2 on a 2G Celeron box with a Foxconn mATX board with 400Mhz FSB and 740M of 266 DDR RAM.

Any suggestions? :-)

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

How many extensions do you have? Some of them might need to be disabled or updated if you have recently updated FF. You might want to disable them all and try, then re-enable them a few at a time if disabling them fixed the problem.

[ciddyguy.livejournal.com]

Thanks, I'll give that a shot. I don't think I've done anything different to make them change but who knows?

[jrjarrett.livejournal.com]

What DVR software are you running? Now that I have time on my hands, I think I will pick up my MythTV explorations again.

BTW: Bear geeks are hawt.

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

Right now I am using the ATI recorder software, it works with Guide Plus and can save shows in various formats.

[psuweightlifter.livejournal.com]

Dang, wish I were building stuff like that. What are you using to rip your dvds onto the hd? Some day, I'll build a nice little sff pc, sigh...

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

DVD Shrink

[beartech420.livejournal.com]

I'd love to see how you installed the heatpipe. Heat Transfer was one of my favorite courses in college (I normally lose friends when I say that).
Yeppper geeky is sexy! woof!
Q:pick maryanne or ginger?
A:the professor! Smart is sexy and who else do you know who can build an electric generator out of bamboo and coconut shells!
best regards,
pete

[greatbearmd.livejournal.com]

The heatpipes were part of the heatsink assembly. The mobo also has a heatpipe setup that cool the power regulators and the chipsets. Makes for a simple, quiet setup, and looks cool as hell.