New Server Hardware Recommendations

[bbenkstein]

I think my existing system is about to roll over and play dead. Looking for recommendations for a new HTPC to run SageTV. I need the box to be fairly small, quiet and energy efficient. It just needs to be able to record to disk from 2 HD-PVRs and 4 HDHomeRun tuners (I've got all my movies on a NAS) and run comskip. I also have a USB-UIRT. The box will not be used for playback (I've got 2 HD-100s and 1 HD-200 for that). I was thinking about the following but don't really know much about hardware:

SilverStone-Aluminum-Steel-Computer-GD05B
Antec EA-380D Power Supply EA-380D
ASUS AMD Zacate E350 E35M1-M PRO
G.SKILL Ripjaws Series 4GB (2 x 2GB) SDRAM
OCZ Agility 3 SSD 60 GB (Windows 7)
Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green (Recordings)

Thanks for any assistance.

[KeithAbbott]

I'd spend a little extra and splurge on a 3 TB drive, 50% more space can never hurt...

[Telecore]

Your requirements and system are very close to mine. I ran two HD-PVRs and 4 HDHomeruns off an old Asus motherboard (M2NPV-VM) with an Athlon X2 C5000+ 4GB DDR2 with 5 x 2TB HDDs (Green) in a Silverstone LC17 case for the past year with SageTV. I built a 2nd PC for WMC with the Silverstone GD05 case. Both cases work great but the LC-17 can hold a lot more hard drives (6) plus a 5.25" DVD drive. I also have an OCZ SSD (60GB) in my Sage server. I recently upgraded to an HDHomerun Prime and got rid of the two HD-PVRs and put in an AMD Athlon II X2 270 processor (65W=low power) and went to Windows 7 Pro 64 bit. Everything still is good. I'm not using the WMC PC because I've got FIOS and everything (except one channel) is coming in as Copy freely so it works with SageDCT + all my extenders. Go to Silentpcreview for recommended power supplies. Use Windows7 Pro 64 bit so you can run headless and use Remote Desktop to control the server. Home edition can only be a Remote Desktop client. I've been consider MB upgrade to Asus M5A88-M. Hard drives are expensive right now due to Thailand flooding. Some M/Bs can only see up to 2GB on HDDs. Hope that helps.

[Fuzzy]

Pretty much any hardware you can buy today will do what you are asking of this... The HD-PVR does it's encoding in it's own hardware.. the HDHomeRun doesn't encode anything. The slowest currently produced processor would be more than capable of simply recieving the bits from those devices, and writing them to a couple hard drives. If you are looking to DO anything with that data (like comskip, or placeshifter transcoding, for instance), then you will need a bit more (but even then, shoot for a middle of the road dual core, or a low end quad core).

[Skybolt]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

Pretty much any hardware you can buy today will do what you are asking of this... The HD-PVR does it's encoding in it's own hardware.. the HDHomeRun doesn't encode anything. The slowest currently produced processor would be more than capable of simply recieving the bits from those devices, and writing them to a couple hard drives. If you are looking to DO anything with that data (like comskip, or placeshifter transcoding, for instance), then you will need a bit more (but even then, shoot for a middle of the road dual core, or a low end quad core).

I totally agree, for years I used a P4 for 6 clients. - I currently use an older Q9400 series quad core, which is extreamly over kill! I tested a dual core atom 1.8ghz (525) and that only averaged 25-30% cpu with 3 clients watching avi files. - I don't use comskip or place shifter though. My preferance is intel based CPU's though.

[bbenkstein]

Thanks everyone, I think I've decided on the following (since I intend to do comskip):

SilverStone-Aluminum-Steel-Computer-GD04B
Intel Core i3-2120T
GIGABYTE GA-Z68M-D2H
Seasonic S12II-380
OCZ Gold Low Voltage Dual Channel Kit 4 GB
OCZ Vertex 2 40 GB (Windows 7 Pro 64 bit)
Western Digital 2 TB Caviar Green

[david1234]

the only thing I might change is to use a couple laptop drives instead of one bigger drive. It will cost a bit more, but should use less power and put off less heat.