Hard Drive Configuration

SukitTrebek · #1 02-27-2007, 01:40 AM

I'm thinking about building a home theater pc. Right now, I have a computer that has a 37gb 10k rpm raptor drive. To turn it into the htpc, I was going to add a couple 320gb 7200 rpm seagate drives.

Should I take out the raptor (to put in a different computer), and just run the two big drives? Or should I leave the small fast drive in as the main one "doing stuff" with the operating system and the two big ones as the storage ones?

I had one person tell me that leaving the small one in doesn't make any sense. But I've read that people partition their hard drives to put the operating system in it's own partition. If I ran all three drives wouldn't that be that inherently be my setup? Is it better?

-Trebek

ohgeetee · #2 02-27-2007, 02:06 AM

you arent going to be taking advantage of the raptor really. throw the raptor in a gaming rig. your pc can decode video much faster than the hd can fling it.

LuckyTxGuy · #3 02-27-2007, 02:39 AM

I've got a home theater pc I build a few years ago, that is currently running XP Media Center (and has been since it's release). I have my OS on a smaller drive 120 GB I think, and then I record my tv onto a 300 GB drive. I've moved some movies over to the main 120 GB drive and I also use it as a backup/server for my other computers. I really need to add another big drive since I've got soooo much poker recorded on the "Recorded TV" drive that it's about full.

I see no reason at all that it would be stupid to run your OS on a separate drive, especially since I'm doing it.lol I think my question would be, do you really need to Raptor to run the OS though. Maybe the drive would be better used in another machine? If you are just running the OS on the Raptor and not using the machine for much else, you probably wouldn't realize the benefit of the RPM's. Just a thought? But it sure wouldn't hurt.

There is some major myths out there that have people believing that to run a home theater pc you need a souped up, state of the art machine. That just isn't true. I've got a AMD XP 2800+, 512 MB of RAM, a PCI Hauppauge WinTV PVR-150
MCE card and XP Media Center. The Hauppauge has MPEG video encoding on the card which helps take the load off the machine itself. This machine is several years old now and it still runs as efficiently as it did back then and I have no problems using it to watch 100% of my tv, movies, and listening to music.

SukitTrebek · #4 02-28-2007, 12:13 AM

sweet, hopefully you'll be able to help me with a bunch of questions about htpc's. i've been reading a bunch on avsforums, but am still relatively clueless.

i have about the same computer you do and am primarily looking to turn it into an hdtivo. i presume yours doesn't currently do hdtv?

i'll have to make a htpc thread at some point. many questions.