Poofyhairguy's HTPC Recommendation Thread

EarnheadJ Wrote:Poofyhairguy, welcome back. Always enjoy reading you're posts.

Thank you very much.

My F4 is much faster than my 7200rpm drives, albeit due to the higher density. Same results with write caching on/off.

According to HD Tune:

Transfer rate (F4 2TB 95% full)
Min: 62MB/s
Max: 142MB/s
Avg: 108MB/s
Burst: 202MB/s

Transfer rate (Seagate 400gb 7200rpm 60% full)
Min: 38MB/s
Max: 79MB/s
Avg: 64MB/s
Burst: 206MB/s

How do we get this thing stickied? I was saddened to find this on page 2 already This thread has been like a "zero to hero" getting started guide for me

XxTRAINEExX Wrote:How do we get this thing stickied? I was saddened to find this on page 2 already This thread has been like a "zero to hero" getting started guide for me

only the ADMIN or a MOD can do

Hardware I Love:

1. Nvidia GPUs -especially for Linux
2. WD Green HDs -more info below
3. SSDs
4. Antec, Lian Li or Silverstone cases- very well built
5. Zotac ION systems- I have run through a few, all have been rock solid
6. Asrock Vision 3D- best all-in-one HTPC on earth
7. Hitachi 7200 RPM HDs - more info below
8. Nvidia 430 GT - best HTPC GPU on earth. I don't care what that damn review says, they don't test different encodes like I do
9. Gigabyte mobos - ROCK SOLID, what Asus once was
10. Antec Neo PSUs- secret of Newegg, these beautiful Seasonic PSUs are the best <$100 mediaserver PSUs on the market

Hardware I Hate

1. ASRock ION 3D - Its a lie. It doesn't have the power for 3D by my testing.
2. Intel GPUs- on every platform their drivers suck (especially Linux) Intel Rant 1 Rant 2
3. The AGP slot- completely worthless in 2011. Get a 8400GS 512mb PCI card instead.
4. Samsung HDs and Seagate 5900RPM HDs- I would love to take them off the list...
5. Via - RUN from their stuff

Hey poofyhairguy, nice to see you back on the forums helping those with your expansive hardware knowledge.

I have a question if I please may?

poofyhairguy Wrote:3. Western Digital Green HDs - NOT for RAID or ZFS, but great for Unraid as they are fast enough and they are the coolest drives

I've been planning out an UnRaid NAS for a while now, to replace my AIO Ubuntu Server with SMB shares. I'm now trying to work out the drives I'm going to use. I have a fair collections of 500GB drives at home that I'll be selling and thinking about getting 3 2TB drives (for now) for the system. One of these 3 will be the parity drive, and based on your advice I'm going to be going WD Green.

This is my first UnRaid build, and I understand the parity drive is the bottleneck on the system so I'll be using one of my old 500GB drives as a cache drive. Would you recommend making one of my WD Greens (the one that will be the parity) 7200 instead of 5400 to speed up the parity writes?

I know this is not technically XBMC HW-related, but I defer to your superior understanding, and outspoken views on the hardware you have extensively tested that has and hasn't met the high grade you've set for it.

Thanks for your help.

^^ Several of the new Green drives with the higher density per platter are as fast or faster than the 7200rpm drives with less dense platters. The 7200rpm drives will have a faster access time though, but not by much. If you're using a cache drive I wouldn't expect a faster parity drive to make a difference.

Many times the green series drives are not recommended for RAID due to the APM settings (they fall out of the array easier and sleep after short periods of time). Green drives also do not have TLER.

The speed of the green drives is not the concern.

That being said, the green drives will work fine in RAIDZ (ZFS).

bmcclure937 Wrote:Many times the green series drives are not recommended for RAID due to the APM settings (they fall out of the array easier and sleep after short periods of time). Green drives also do not have TLER.

The speed of the green drives is not the concern.

That being said, the green drives will work fine in RAIDZ (ZFS).

He's using unRAID, so ZFS or RAID doesn't apply to him

Question (hope I'm not derailing this thread too much).

I have an old Dell XPS tower that I'm not using. I'm thinking about turning this into an unraid server. The motherboard has 4 Sata ports and a couple of IDE. I currently have 1 Hitachi Deskstar 2tb drive with content all ready on it. It has about 250 GB free. I have a second (same drive) in the mail that should be here in a few days. I also have another 500GB drive that I could wipe to use for parity.

My main question is, how can I incorporate the drive that all ready has content? Will this work for unRaid or do I have to start with all clean drives?