ASROCK 330 second generation

hogfan Wrote:Apparently they don't want to sell this in the US. Still no info at all on release dates and/or pricing. If they ever decide to sell these things in the western world should we expect to see a price drop on the current models? Still $350 on Newegg.com.

Since they sell it in Europe, it's sold in the Western World. Europe (or what is was way back) is what originally was called the Western World. This was expanded to parts of America after Columbus or something like that.

*slightly* off topic..

hogfan Wrote:Apparently they don't want to sell this in the US. Still no info at all on release dates and/or pricing. If they ever decide to sell these things in the western world should we expect to see a price drop on the current models? Still $350 on Newegg.com.

I have been checking the Canadian side of this for a while, and today I noticed that some of these new models were listed (not yet available) on the Canadian NCIX site:

http://ncix.com/search/?categoryid=0&q=asrock+330ht

I was a bit disappointed to see the higher prices compared to the current models...

Emailed ASROCK about avability in the US, and recieved the following good news

ASROC Wrote:It will available in US by end of this month or begging of December in Newegg. Thanks

weldon Wrote:Emailed ASROCK about avability in the US, and recieved the following good news

That is good news. I don't understand why they don't release that information from the beginning.

I'm on the cusp of buying an ION330HT (when the IR issue gets sorted at least) but am concerned that my current setup isn't going to hold up when streaming 1080p stuff.

Currently I have a wired gigabit network but the bottleneck seems to be the Buffalo Terastation 1.5TB NAS that I have. Typically I only get about 2mb/sec when transferring a file from a PC on my network to the NAS.

If I were to replace the NAS with an eSATA drive and plug that into the ION clearly transfer rates would be more than enough but my concern would be how I get the files from the "download" PC to that drive. Although I've worked in IT for 20 years I'm a total Linux noob but I assume I can share folders on the external drive via Linux on the ION and they'd be visible to a Windows7 machine??

or would I be better just to put as big a drive as possible directly into the ION

or would a 1.5TB external drive using USB2 attached to the ION be enough

or should I not worry about it all and see what happens?

Great news on release date for US. And thank you nice Swedish gentleman for giving me a history lesson. I am well aware that Europe is part of the Western world. My previous post was one of frustration and sarcasm. Tired of products getting reviewed and tested, and then not being able to buy them.

@ShinyAndy

eSata external drive will get you more space for the $ than a larger internal 2.5" drive. I'm going internal so I can take the machine with me and have all my collection.

However, with an eSata drive and and network connection to the HTPC, you can use SAMA on Linux to share the eSata drive and copy files to it from you windows PC.

The old model is $350 and the new model is $499, so we are paying $150 on wireless and the IR remote + receiver.

darethehair Wrote:I have been checking the Canadian side of this for a while, and today I noticed that some of these new models were listed (not yet available) on the Canadian NCIX site:

http://ncix.com/search/?categoryid=0&q=asrock+330ht

I was a bit disappointed to see the higher prices compared to the current models...

If I read it right, the new model also supports RAID 0+1 configuration. If they are selling for $500 for the now Blue-ray model, they can hang on to it for awhile. The thing that frustrates me about these HTPCs is that you are paying more for small form factor than the actual hardware itself.