HTPC HDDs, Small OS drive + Storage or All in one?

I want to find out how you guys run your HTPC's.
Also I want to know what kind of HDDs you use.

I have multiple rigs and I use 1 OS drive + apps on it and 1 or more storage drives.
In the market for a quiet small (80GB or < ) OS drive.

LVM FTW.

760GB in a 160GB, 300GB, and another 300GB, the last added a few months after initial setup. And no setup changes needed whatsoever, beyond expanding the logical volume.

i voted 1 os drive, one storage drive but I prefer a server client setup even more. I use one small OS drive in y clients and they connect to a server with one OS drive and several storage drives. keeps the noise and heat away from the living room.

What ID said. It's how I have my setup as well.

I have raid 0 on my machine, with a wd1600aajs on the way to use as my system drive. When that gets here, I'll relegate the raid 0 to apps and data. Like ID, I put most of my data on my server with an OS drive and a raid 1 array for data.

yes. I r so smeart. where's my cookie?

I VERY MUCH prefer having the OS on one drive, and the storage on another drive, or better yet, on a server. LVM2 rules.... as does xfs (on the fly resizing of a filesystem FTW!)

-q

40gb Seagate Barracuda ATA IV. A very quiet drive which will probably die on me sometime soon. No matter as I have imaged my system and can restore it from DVD. I also have 4 more of those 40gb Seagates at work just waiting... I run just the system (MCE) and nothing more.

All media is stored on a Netgear SC101 with 2x400GB Hitachis. I am currently testing the D-Link DNS 323. So far I have only been trying to mod the iTunes server but I will try the actual unit in MCE sometime soon. The SC101 meets all my requirements.

Intermediate media (which I don't yet want to access as having 100 movies in my movies folder is enough) is on my other PC and on my gf's Mac and accessible through shares if need be.

PC
1x250gb (samsung) (system + apps)
2x400gb (hitachi) (games, media, pr0n, comics, and so on...)

Mac
1x250gb (mac... it just works :/ )

My friend has 4 harddisks in his HTPC. He complained that it was loud. I told him to shut it off and unplug all drives except the system drive and then restart it. Both he and I could hear the difference. Much less humming and reverb. The DNS 323 is a bit expensive sadly.

Nothing is more annoying than a loud htpc... I also like being able to upload and manage media to the network storage without having to turn on the htpc and without causing disk activity on the htpc.

For a quiet system drive Samsung 250gb sata is fast, quiet and cheap.

I went for all on one drive. Most HTPC usage is very light on program/operating system access so it doesn't really need to be on a dedicated drive. You're not trying to shave milliseconds off the load time of a 500MB game map here, most htpc front-ends should fit into memory and then require very little HD access, maybe only to load a filter or two.

Additionally, HTPC cases normally have fewer hard drive mounts than regular cases, so if you're not going the server/client route, you want to squeeze in as many of the biggest drives you can afford. A bunch of older smaller drives will fill up a case and produce a lot more heat/noise than a single bug drive (or 2).

Having said that, using a smallish (~4gb) flash card for the os drive wouldn't be too bad a choice, with a separate storage drive. Having a small drive in a client machine also makes the most sense, especially if it's an older drive that you expect to die, but can create an image of to quickly get back up to speed.

i have:
WD 120GB SATA3.0 HDD for OS
3 Samsung 250GB SATA3.0 JBOD storage
1 WD 160GB backup

well my plan is to get 2 500g hdd either 2 seagate 7200.10 or 2 wd se16 and pop them in an antec fusion case. originally I was planning on getting a 40 or 80 gig for the OS and pair that w/ just 1 500g hd but I figured that would be a waste of a hdd slot in the antec fusion.

80gb OS and Misc partitions
300gb PVR drive
35gb REV for backup of photos, etc.
320gb x4 in RAID 5 for media drive
300gb external as supplemental storage
40gb x2 external as supplemental storage

I have the ultimate in overkill:

2x74GB Raptors in RAID1 for my boot drive
4x400GB in RAID5 for my storage drive

I had the Raptors left over form an old desktop system (yes, I bought into the RAID0 craze ), and couldn't stand to see them collecting dust, so I used em for a fast boot drive.

RAID5+LVM+NFS = win!

Put everything on a backend server so the drives don't make noise in your living room. RAID5 gives you great speed and reliability. LVM gives you excellent expandability. NFS gives you fantastic portability. You can't lose!

I have my mythtv frontend netbooting off of my fileserver. I have no permanent storage in the frontend whatsoever. It's quite liberating.