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Kilamon · Rated XXX

Guess I should update this....

Ok, so I decided that the media center/HTPC wasn't enough. It needed data, obviously. So on a dismal weekend, I copied everything to my PC and spare hard drives. In all, I now have about 1.2 tb of movies and music. Once I centralized, with a new WD MyBook, I realized I was still short of my target since I had to put the MyBook in Raid0, which is not safe. So, I tore down my old network server (dual 250gb drives in software raid1, Ubuntu Hoary Hedgehog) and put in an old motherboard, tested out all the memory, etc, and had it running ESXi for a week and did a new server install and a OpenFiler ESX Appliance. Problem, I felt, was that the motherboard identified all 4 of my 1tb drives and when I went to raid them, I only got 768gb or 2tb depending on whether I used 3 or 4 drives. My goal was a full 3 tb (I need room to grow). So, I fiddled around and decided that the BIOS needed flashing to update the nvidia raid from 4.8 to 5.0 and now the damned mobo won't post (DFI SLI-DR -- 4 lights showing on post LEDs). Sooo I'm at the point now where I gotta use my other DFI SLI-DR and rebuild the server. I'm just going to do another software raid this time, though. Openfiler gave me that option and allowed me to do all 4 of the tb drives for the max capacity at raid5. I'm still not sure how to get some measure of safety for the 2 250gb drives - I can't get them to raid1 and when I do, ESXi sees right through it and views them both as individual drives.

Oh, the HTPC? Yes, I was going to use the second old DFI board and the sonictower for it, but now I need to get a new mobo, on the cheap, and it has to work with a 350w PSU, and the HIS Radeon HD 4670 (no fan on this bad boy). Since I'm shopping for THAT, I'm trying to keep it cheap and fanless. Not an easy task. Oh, and I got a Blu-Ray drive for the HTPC too. So far, I have the old PSU to use, the new blue-ray and the video card and an old Lian Li case. That leaves just the mobo,cpu, and memory. Hard drive, you say? I'm going to use an 8gb USB stick to boot and use XBMC as the primary interface, using MS SteadyState to ensure that nothing changes on the XP-based machine short of patches.