mini ITX media server

[Webby]

Ah sorry missed the earlier question as jay said it all depends on which CF card you get, I will go into it a bit now just for reference but in terms of price/performance unless silence is required or you can not fit a normal HDD, the HDD is pretty much the best option.

For the CF cards to be any good you really need a fast card we are talking 133x at least but 300x as a preference the problem is a 4GB 300x card is £35, so you can imagine the costs of a 16GB card! In fact fro the money you could probably buy a 32GB OCZ SSD which will have better performance than the CF card as well.

Basically the cards cost to much so HDD are better, sad but true.

[strike-down]

ahhh ok, so not worth the trouble then. No silence isnt critical this time round, as the server is going to be tucked away in a corner. I was just wondering about a slight performance boost from using one, but costs too much for the high spec cf cards. Im just dreading the loft search for the hdd sods law states that it will be in the last box i search. typical.

[strike-down]

Got midway through and found the drive, not so bad after all Got the componants ordered now just waiting for their arrival. Will post as soon as system is built Thanks again for your help guys

[Webby]

Not a problem, We will await progress reports and photos, gotta have photos its in the rules

[strike-down]

Photos might not happen for a couple of months . . my camera broke last month. I stupidly left it in my pocket while kiteboarding, trick went wrong and i landed on the camera. Felt like such an idiot lol Got a nice camera shaped bruise though You'd have thought I would have learned my lesson doing something similar with my previous phone. Ahh well.
As soon as I get a bit more money in the kitty, will get a new camera and post photos

[strike-down]

Ok, parts arrived yesterday build time
The Venus 669 case is pretty sexy and for a mini ITX case its got a huge amound of space inside.
The motherboard does feel a little bit cheap, but still. it has all the features I want. Pity it doesnt have an LVDS port though, as I have a spare lcd panel from a netbook that decided to short out and destroy itself. Could have done a nice case mod with that.
How I hate installing CPU's. I always get worried about snapping pins off, especially since the lever always feels stiffer than I expect it to be. Got it in though
Installed the RAM next as it does look impossible to do once the cpu cooler is in place. Damn that cooler is going to look out of place on that motherboard. Got the cooler on, and yes it looks like a skyscraper in this system.
I installed the hard drive and the optical drive without too much hassle, was a little bit fiddly, but hey.
Multilane sata bridge in and connected.

One thing I am a little bit confused about, is why the infiniband cable is so damn expensive for what it is.

That aside, the addonics mini storage tower is top notch. It comes with the relevant adaptors to install the hard drives without having to use the drive cartidge system (as each drive bay is 5.25")
It took 10 minutes to set that up. Has to be the easiest drive enclosure I've ever used. And for £65, I'm impressed. It is a bit larger than I thought though.

Took me a total of 40 minutes to put this little beastie together, and despite the cheap feel of some of the things, it works which is always good

Just got to install OS and drivers now, will post tomorrow about that as I am off to Bristol now to see the stone gods and airbourne

Hopefully get a couple of benchmarks in aswell.

EDIT: As I said in my last post, cant take pictures yet as I dont have a camera but I promise I will get some up in the next couple of months
At least you cant see the spider web of sata and power cables inside the computer case Gotta tidy that up still

[tfboy]

If you're using CF as the OS disk, you have to be wary of a few things, mainly having the OS on a CF card will kill it over a period of time due to how often you can rewrite flash-based memory.
XP is particularly bad when it comes to pagefile, temporary files, registry updates, etc, and each and every write will gradually deteriorate the card.

There is a way around it, but it's technically rather complicated, and involves ensuring your CF card is recognised as a non-removable HDD and using EWF or Extended Write Filter. This has the effect of storing all changes to a given partition (i.e. your CF OS partition) to RAM and then writing the changes in one go to CF when you shut down, saving the multiple writes to flash.

Having said that, if you do get it working on CF, you get the benefit of reasonably fast OS - remember once loaded, you're going to be more after random seek reads / writes for which flash RAM is a lot faster than hard disk tech

edit: I seem to remember EWF is only available in XPe which you can get an evaluation version from MS free. Here's a link: http://www.windowsdevcenter.com/pub/...PCHacks_Chap1/

[Tropi]

Sorry, I'm very late in finding this discussion

Strike-down, can you say where you found the Addonics mini storage tower please? I can't find an Addonics stockist anywhere in UK!

[strike-down]

http://www.addonics.com/products/raid_system/mst4.asp
I just bought direct from them (though I bought it while the pound was still strong against the dollar)
also appears their cart page has gone down

EDIT: Alternative would be something like the Icy Dock. Only reason I went with the addonics tower is because it used the multilane sata interface, so a single link cable instead of 4 sata cables. Or a single esata cable with a performance drop. Only downside, the multilane sata cable is stupidly expensive for what it is.

[Tropi]

Thank you for more or less confirming that Addonics is close to impossible to source in UK.

Such a shame, because they make really useful stuuff, but with costly shipping and high likelihood of VAT and import duty etc, sourcing from USA just isn't very attractive these days.