[Cheetohz]

Now, for my HTPC I am looking for Cheap HDMI output, this can be onboard, however I want a soundcard capable of 24/96k audio. Currently I am running into some bottleneck on the system I have with all the media I have indexed I think. my youtube app takes 5+ minutes to load a trailer when I want to bring one up. I remove all the network shares from the system so there is no media, and youtube loads instantly. So I need to upgrade this to a more efficient system. I'll probably want an integrated onboard IR sensor for this as well.

All of my media is currently hosted on 10x 2TB hdds spread across 3 machines. I'd like to consolidate some of my rack space and get these all hosted from a single system. I plan on building a NAS box for all of this. I know nothing when it comes to hardware for this, should I buy a quality board and use PCI-E sata cards, or find a board with 10+ onboard sata ports?

There's simply too much hardware on the market to know exactly what is right for my needs.

[noggin]

I think we need to know more about your HTPC requirements - what OS you want to run (Windows? Linux?), what features you need (HD Audio bit streaming? 3D - and if so what content?), whether you need Netflix, Amazon Video etc. ?

We know you have 20TB of storage, but also be useful to know approx how many movies/TV shows this is to get an idea of the size of your XBMC databases.

When it comes to server/NAS solutions, similarly, do you have any requirements for drive redundancy, do you need the server to run other applications other than just straight file serving?

I run unRAID with a similar number of drives to you. I went for a motherboard that was recommended as compatible by other users, and it had 6 on-board SATA ports, to which I added a 4 port PCI-E SATA card which was known to be compatible. There are motherboards with lots of SATA ports, but sometimes you pay over the odds for this and it is more economic to add a PCI-E card.

[Cheetohz]

All 20 TB are not currently filled as it is inconvenient to be shuffling them from machine to machine. I have about 15k movies/tv episodes and 500k songs. the rest is used for personal documents.

Found my bottleneck on my HTPC, was just an app called watchdog which I used to keep everything up to date. disabled it and everything loads smoother again, i suppose there is too much for it to keep scanning. I don't have cable TV, so everything I do is from the HTPC, except for gaming on a console.

I look for HDMI out to my display, and optical out to my receiver. I want to be able to play 24/96 and 24/192 audio.

I can't decide between these 2 chassis.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B001NO7THO/ref=...764CKCMYNH

http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004GCOY3M/ref=...6LZTK5PYMO

I already have 2x 5 bay hdd cages for the chenbro, so that may save money. Just not sure if I will be wanting to support 20 drives in a single NAS. or if I will want to upgrade later when that amount of storage is actually needed.