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vxspiritxv
[H]ard|Gawd
- Joined
- Feb 10, 2001
- Messages
- 1,618
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.
Turns out the drives survived.
Day or two later, LSI card showed up and the battery.
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.
Yes the battery is ziptied to the ATX connector.
Eventually I will mount it in the rack.
Just one of the five xboxes:
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.
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.
Turns out the drives survived.
Day or two later, LSI card showed up and the battery.
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.
Yes the battery is ziptied to the ATX connector.
Eventually I will mount it in the rack.
Just one of the five xboxes:
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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