[g-a-c]

Hi guys,
I currently have an Asrock ION330 working with XBMC Live. It's exactly as it came, so 2GB of RAM and 160GB system hard drive. I have 3 * 500GB USB hard drives attached with ZFS/RAID-Z for media storage.

I'm thinking of replacing this with an HP Microserver but I'm confused about graphics cards. I priced up a G210 which is dirt cheap and available either with a fan or fanless for about £20. I have a mix of content, mostly .mkv x264, some DVDs that I've ripped straight to ISOs for convenience, some old .avi (not even sure what codecs etc). Am I correct in thinking that the G210 will be able to play everything the Ion can? I wouldn't like to upgrade and then find that some of my content doesn't work as well.

Also, I would like to use the 4 Microserver bays for a bigger storage array (probably 4 * 2TB in RAID-Z2), and I'll need an optical drive for playing back my DVDs, so I'll have used all the factory bays. Is it just long boot times which is an issue with USB booting? I never reboot my HTPC (which is why I like low power boxes) so I don't care much about long boot times, but is a USB pendrive going to cause it to be slow in operation as well? I would probably put 8GB of RAM into the Microserver and set up a tmpfs filesystem for use whenever possible which should help the speeds while the box is up and running I think?

Cheers for any advice and any opinions on whether it's worth the hassle or not!

[PatrickVogeli]

I'd get the microserver.. but ONLY as a server! I'd install Unraid in it and you can have a very nice server.. the easiest would be 4x2TB to have a 6TB storage machine, but using the esata and the sata dvd ports you can have up 6x2TB = 10 TB of protected storage. Not bad eh?

Then I'd keep the Asrock as the Htpc to play the stuff stored in the server.

EDIT:
http://www.avforums.com/forums/networkin...d-nas.html
http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.p...ic=11585.0

[g-a-c]

That's another idea, although I think that would entail rather more upgrades than I'd like to take on at the moment. I'd have to take up floorboards to put a Cat6 cable from my router (downstairs) to my desktop PC (upstairs on the other side of the house) for a start. At the moment I'm using powerline adapters which are perfectly adequate for transfer speed etc, but the downstairs one takes up a valuable and scarce power socket as they're no good in extensions. Would also probably need to upgrade to a gigabit switch and/or replace my WRT54GS with something else, etc.

So while that would be ideal, it'd turn what started out as a nice cheap and easy project into something rather less so! I have to say that I do like the Asrock form factor, it's just a shame that it's quite difficult to expand it storage-wise (hence the USB disks, they're not perfect but they're "fast enough", they offer multiple spindles for RAID-Z redundancy, and they're bus-powered so don't take up a power socket). I stupidly bought the model without eSATA as well, so I can't just put some kind of eSATA DAS enclosure onto it