I bought an old server from a refurb shop. 4x PIII 700 Xeon, 2GB RAM, U160 RAID controller w/ 4x 18GB HDs, trple redundant powersupply. I slapped in a 6 port SATA RAID controller and made an external drave caddy w/ 6x 250 GB drives. The front end can be real cheap boxes 'cause all of the work is done on the backend. The box cost ~$150 befor the controller and drives, but still came out under $1000 (well, I already had tuner cards). Plus, the back end also serves as a VMWare server for all of my tinkering and it still barely scratches it's performance roof.
<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 9/12/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Taylan Pince</b> <<a href="mailto:taylan@taylanpince.com">taylan@taylanpince.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<br>On 12-Sep-06, at 8:15 PM, Andrew Davis wrote:<br><br>> You'd be surprised, but here's the breakdown (sans pricing since<br>> I'm not<br>> allowed to share my vendors pricing publically):<br>><br>> Silverstone Aluminum case LC17
<br>> Antec 550W NEO Low noise HE P/S<br>> Motherboard (955X7AA-8EKRS2 w/ 8 port SATAII RAID5/6 option)<br>> Intel DualCore 3.2Ghz (BX80553940T)<br>> Upgraded Silverstone heatsink/fan (Nitrogon NT06)<br>> 4Gb Corsair DDR2 PC5400 memory (4x1GB)
<br>> Memory heatsink/fins<br>> 3x500 SATAII WD 16Mb cache HD w/ 3 year warranty<br>> Plextor 16x (every format but HD/BR) SATA DVD drive<br>> 3.5'' USB2/FireWire400 & 800/52 type media reader, CPU + Ambient
<br>> Temp reader<br>> Leadtek Winfast 128Mb DDR 16xPCI-E VGA/DVI/HDTV<br>> Happauge WinTV PVR 500 MCE Kit (w/ remote)<br>><br>> Grand total was $2500. Priced out at Newegg was $2250 + shipping...<br>><br>
> I didn't think it was all that much til I realized it wouldn't<br>> completely replace my Cox tuner/DVR nor my current DVD unit since its<br>> also my speaker output/amp.<br>><br>> Oh yeah... and it wasn't *just* going to run MythTV, but also run
<br>> Evolution, Firefox, etc as my normal Linux box... as well as some BB &<br>> Nagios monitoring. And I was considering having it store my ripped<br>> movie<br>> collection and making it available to my system at work (I have a 10Mb
<br>> Cox business feed at home and three T1's trunked for 4.5Mbps at work).<br>><br>> Gabe Rubin wrote:<br>>> On 9/12/06, Andrew Davis <<a href="mailto:andrew@nccomp.com">andrew@nccomp.com</a>> wrote:
<br>>><br>>>> nice box and such. Hmmm... perhaps I should rethink this before I<br>>>> drop<br>>>> over $2000 in h/w...<br>>><br>>> $2000 bucks for hardware is very much overkill (unless that includes
<br>>> your TV). I can't imagine how you can spend that much on a mythbox.<br>>> I would think $1000 could get you a very kick ass system.<br><br>For my myhthtv box, I bought the cheapest ready to go PC from my
<br>local store. 512MB ram, intel dual core 2.66Ghz and a 160GB hard<br>drive, 16x dual layer dvd writer. Added a PVR-350 and a secondary<br>320GB drive, the total came to $600 CAD. I later added an improved<br>heatsink at $60, which pretty much silenced it completely. It has
<br>integrated video, I was thinking about getting an Nvidia card, but I<br>don't think I need it.<br><br>I had initially budgeted this project at $1,000, but there really is<br>no need to spend that much money. Unless you are really going to push
<br>the machine with other tasks, the cheapest solution is usually the<br>best. I might be wrong, but I think most of the load is handled by<br>the TV tuner card, and all your machine has to do is to write the<br>data on the disk fast enough.
<br><br>I use the box for watching TV on a 17'' Samsung LCD, recording TV<br>series/movies, and I can stream to my PowerMac G5 with a 30'' Dell<br>LCD very easily. I am also running Apache and Samba servers, do<br>occasional web development tests.
<br><br>I don't know much about PC's, Linux or MythTV, but from my experience<br>in the last couple of months, there really is no point in spending so<br>much money on this project.<br><br>Hope it helps, and please someone correct me if I am wrong. I might
<br>very well be!<br><br>Taylan<br><br>_______________________________________________<br>mythtv-users mailing list<br><a href="mailto:mythtv-users@mythtv.org">mythtv-users@mythtv.org</a><br><a href="http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users">
http://mythtv.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mythtv-users</a><br></blockquote></div><br>