Many conversations started here and elsewhere seem to brush over the bigger picture. I wanted to share my set up in the hope that anyone could suggest meaningful improvements I could make and to help others see what I did...
Requirements
So the following hardware configuration was my $0.02 at getting that:
Hardware
1x Asus E35M1-M PRO DUAL-CORE E350 DDR3 Zacate (£83)
1x 64GB m4 SATA 6Gb/s 2.5" Solid State Drive (£68)
3x Seagate 3TB Barracuda SATA 6GB/s 64MB 7200RPM 3.5" Hard Drive (£130 each)
1x ValueRam 4GB (1X4GB) DDR3 1066 (£16)
1x LG Electronics 10x Internal BD Combo Retail Kit (£42)
1x Nice Zalman case with 8x hot swap bays. (£120 used)
1x 350W PSU, Be Quiet Efficient Power Supply (£56)
1x Old Microsoft Media Centre remote and receiver. (god knows!)
Obviously I needed to buy a metric shit ton of little bits for my setup, cables etc. I've also had a little trouble with powering the thing, power button is a bit odd and doesn't light up all the time, and bringing the motherboard BIOS up to full power causes odd resets, so I think my PSU is right up against its limits at times. Worth it for now, as it was a reasonable price, very very quiet and gold standard efficiency - a nice mixture of features.
See the attached picture for an idea of my box.
Software:
Ripping habits: Manual, single drive operation. I tend to try and use MakeMKV for DVD's, as I can't seem to find a nice way of just pulling the movie out of a DVD from AnyDVD as elegantly. Blu-rays are a different beast, and I only find AnyDVD HD is good enough to reliably give me these discs onto my hard drive. Only Warrior failed to rip recently, otherwise it's been flawless. I've ripped > 600 of my own DVD's, and certainly haven't been regularly ripping from a popular postal rental service along side.
All in all I've been very happy with this set up. I now need to find a way to switch the box on using my Logitech Harmony 895 remote control (£60) macros, alongside everything else.
Anyone recommend improvements?
Do you have similar desires at home, how have you gone about it?
Tangentially: The Zacate E-350 boards are shockingly badly supported on Linux (i've built a thin client style machine for the bedroom off a similar board). Don't buy these unless you are super ready for the headache. OpenElec works for now but I've lost the control I wanted, so I might give it another stab in a few months when the community might have improved. Last resort, Windows.
Requirements
- Very Low Power
- Quick to boot
- Quiet
- Lots of Disk Space
- Minimum one disk redundancy
- Easy to attach more storage when money/space dictates
- Blu-Ray / HD capable
- Easy platform to rip my enormous DVD and growing blu-ray collections.
- Certainly not (very easily) capable of "ripping from a popular postal rental service every few days" *cough**cough**cough**cough**cough*
So the following hardware configuration was my $0.02 at getting that:
Hardware
1x Asus E35M1-M PRO DUAL-CORE E350 DDR3 Zacate (£83)
1x 64GB m4 SATA 6Gb/s 2.5" Solid State Drive (£68)
3x Seagate 3TB Barracuda SATA 6GB/s 64MB 7200RPM 3.5" Hard Drive (£130 each)
1x ValueRam 4GB (1X4GB) DDR3 1066 (£16)
1x LG Electronics 10x Internal BD Combo Retail Kit (£42)
1x Nice Zalman case with 8x hot swap bays. (£120 used)
1x 350W PSU, Be Quiet Efficient Power Supply (£56)
1x Old Microsoft Media Centre remote and receiver. (god knows!)
Obviously I needed to buy a metric shit ton of little bits for my setup, cables etc. I've also had a little trouble with powering the thing, power button is a bit odd and doesn't light up all the time, and bringing the motherboard BIOS up to full power causes odd resets, so I think my PSU is right up against its limits at times. Worth it for now, as it was a reasonable price, very very quiet and gold standard efficiency - a nice mixture of features.
See the attached picture for an idea of my box.
Software:
- Windows 7 Pro - Sadly (£100ish)
- FlexRAID (amazing software RAID) ($49.95 USD)
- AnyDVD HD (See here!)
- MakeMKV (free, for now)
- XBMC (free)
Ripping habits: Manual, single drive operation. I tend to try and use MakeMKV for DVD's, as I can't seem to find a nice way of just pulling the movie out of a DVD from AnyDVD as elegantly. Blu-rays are a different beast, and I only find AnyDVD HD is good enough to reliably give me these discs onto my hard drive. Only Warrior failed to rip recently, otherwise it's been flawless. I've ripped > 600 of my own DVD's, and certainly haven't been regularly ripping from a popular postal rental service along side.
All in all I've been very happy with this set up. I now need to find a way to switch the box on using my Logitech Harmony 895 remote control (£60) macros, alongside everything else.
Anyone recommend improvements?
Do you have similar desires at home, how have you gone about it?
Tangentially: The Zacate E-350 boards are shockingly badly supported on Linux (i've built a thin client style machine for the bedroom off a similar board). Don't buy these unless you are super ready for the headache. OpenElec works for now but I've lost the control I wanted, so I might give it another stab in a few months when the community might have improved. Last resort, Windows.
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