Few Q's - Setting up new HD capable machine

[vonman]

I have loved my Sage box for a long while. I have an Intel P4 running 6.4.

I have finally taken the plunge and have decided to retire that machine and build out an HD capable machine. The new machine is an Intel Quad with 8GB Ram and 2TB disk. The configuration will have one USB SD tuner, three PCI tuners, an HD Homerun and one HD-PVR. I am looking for advice on what OS to install? I have licenses for 64bit servers or can install a flavor of Vista. I do not have access to WHS. Also, after the installation what services should I shut off? I was also thinking of running the whole thing under VMWare. Have you been successful in doing that? Any USB or hardware related issues? As I see it the advantage of VMWare would be that i could snapshot the different configurations. One last question, How should I partition the disks? I remmeber seeing some posts about the block size that should be used for recording partitions? Would you partition? And if so what sounds like a good size for the OS (100GB?).

Thanks in advance for all of your help.

RichieV

[cychou]

Originally Posted by vonman

I have loved my Sage box for a long while. I have an Intel P4 running 6.4.

I have finally taken the plunge and have decided to retire that machine and build out an HD capable machine. The new machine is an Intel Quad with 8GB Ram and 2TB disk. The configuration will have one USB SD tuner, three PCI tuners, an HD Homerun and one HD-PVR. I am looking for advice on what OS to install? I have licenses for 64bit servers or can install a flavor of Vista. I do not have access to WHS. Also, after the installation what services should I shut off? I was also thinking of running the whole thing under VMWare. Have you been successful in doing that? Any USB or hardware related issues? As I see it the advantage of VMWare would be that i could snapshot the different configurations. One last question, How should I partition the disks? I remmeber seeing some posts about the block size that should be used for recording partitions? Would you partition? And if so what sounds like a good size for the OS (100GB?).

Thanks in advance for all of your help.

RichieV

What do you intend to use this machine for? A headless Sage server, or an all in one Sage Media Center? 64-bit OS or not depends on whether you can find stable drivers for all you devices.

I might be wrong, but VMWare only allow you to access certain common devices which they virtualized for you. Last I heard, there might be a version to allow direct USB hardware access. All your PCI capture cards will be useless under VMWare.

I personally use V2i Protector to snapshot my system from time to time, and there are plenty other choices for that purpose.

If you are to connect this machine to a HD display, video card, A/V Codec packages, and related software configurations are of more importance to you than hardware. Sage now have HD extenders available and they are quite popular among forum users. With one of these HD extenders, all you need is a headless Sage server to perform the recording and streaming.

[vonman]

Thanks for your advice. It will be a headless unit feeding two HD200s . Any advice on how best to partition the two 1TB drives?

RichieV

[BFisher]

why partition the drives?

block size is different... use 64k clusters (iirc... it's the largest option)