I went to Fry’s during my lunch break yesterday, but I was disappointed to find that they had absolutely nothing that I was looking for.  I’m so glad MicroCenter is just up the block.

I left there with an Antec Three Hundred case, a WD Caviar SE 160GB SATA HDD,a  Cooler Master Extreme Power 500W PSU and a 120mm Silverstone fan.  The PSU isn’t what I was looking for (they had ThermalTake 430W on sale for $31), but I’ve found the CM PSUs to be fine for standard duties (it will replace the temporary junk PSU in my bedroom HTPC).  The WD OEM drive will be added to my RAID-0 array, giving me three 160GB drives, when I move to the new board next week.  I don’t really need that much space, but I need the extra throughput with all the muxing/demuxing I have going on.  The fan will be for one of the intakes on the Three Hundred.  It’ll take two, but I don’t think I’ll need it.  Plus I can only imagine what this thing is going to sound like.

The board I’ve decided to go with is the Asus vanilla P5Q.  I don’t need all the bells and whistles of the various versions of it, but it looks like a good board and I should be able to do a little overclocking with it.  I’m going to grab a couple GB of G.SKILL DDR2 1066 memory and one of those 8-pin molex adapters to satisfy the 8-phase power plug.  I’ve heard too many conflicting reports that it will take a 4-pin and that it won’t, so for $5 - I’ll just play it safe.  I plan on ordering today, or tomorrow at the latest.  Hopefully, I’ll get to spend next weekend putting it all together.  I think the thing I’m looking most forward to is being able to put my bedroom HTPC in standby at night.  Neither of the Asus boards that I’ve used will do it - and I’ve tried everything.

I’ll post my progression, so check back often - even if I don’t post all that often :)

Not a whole lot been going on for me lately on the HTPC front.  Since I’m not so much of a news-worthy guy either, I know I’m not much good for that on this site either.  I’ve pretty much just been updating things to accommodate my transition to the Video Browser plugin.  Everything worked out fine and I have very little regret.  However, I have been refreshing all the (now dead) links in MyMovies.  I don’t want to be left out in the cold when the MCML interface is put out to those with enough contribution points to give it a try.  I’m sure that will leave me with plenty of room for regret, so I want to be prepared.  Even if the database is a pain to keep up with, I have too much time invested in it to give it up.  It’s export ability may also provide useful if other plugins become more attractive.

I do get to upgrade my primary system though.  I decided not to get the 26″ KDS monitor.  I just don’t need it and my 20.5″ Dell is still a great monitor.  I figured I’d be better off getting a newer motherboard, memory and a new case.  That old Antec full tower is close to 10 years old.  I will be getting my first black case…sad, eh?  I plan  on going for a Gigabyte GA-EP45-DS3R motherboard, 2GB of G. SKILL PC2-8500 DDR2 and some decent case.  The case I’ll buy locally to save on shipping.  I’m probably going to grab a power supply as well.  Not sure what yet, but my Blue Storm is close to 3 years old.  It still works perfectly, but my bedroom HTPC PSU blew a couple of weeks ago and I think it would do well to be retired to that light duty.  I’d like to save a few bucks in the PSU department if I can, but I don’t want to shortchange my quad either.  I’ll have to see what I have and what I can do with it.

I’m probably going to end up getting an Antec Three Hundred case.  It’s only $60 at MicroCenter and is fine for me.   I’m probably going to go to Fry’s today and see what they have it for.  If I can’t get it for the same or better, I’ll head out to MicroCenter tomorrow or Friday.  I’ll be sure to post here when I figure things out (maybe this afternoon, so check back!).

…but I redid my entire directory structure of my movie collection, effectively making my MyMovies database useless since all the links are broken now.  After some consideration, I decided to go with a file-based video information system so that I could use Video Browser as my library manager in Media Center.  It’s not as fully-featured, from an information standpoint, as MyMovies, but it’s coded in MCML and is much nicer looking.  I also find managing my collection easier since I don’t have to worry about forgetting to link a movie in MyMovie’s Collection Manager.  Not to mention I find it much faster than browsing MyMovies’ HTML-based interface.

Don’t get my wrong, I think MyMovies is a fabulous program and I’ll probably be sorry once the MCML frontend comes out.  However, I’m just tired of managing that database.  Anyway, here is a screenshot of the poster view within Video Browser:

Nice, right?  OML is looking nice also, but it uses a localized database for each client and doesn’t support directory structure XML systems, so until it does, I think I’ll stick with this.

That’s about it for now.  Re-doing all of that took most of the past week, which is why I’ve been AWOL.  I’m hoping next week I’ll get to order my new 26″ KDS LCD.

I finally got around to getting the new port multplier adapter, enclosure and drives added to my unRAID set.  Everything went pretty smooth except I had found that all of my TB drives were jumpered for 1.5Gbps operation (default on the Seagates and new Maxtor drives).  You’d think this would be a good find except that after removing the jumper, enabling them for 3Gbps operation, the server would hang during POST.  I tried countless times, but no luck - always with a 5B BIOS POST code, which is within the range assigned to the I/O buses.  5B is specifIc to ATA.  I’ll mess around with it some more later as all the 500GB drives I added hum right along at the 3Gbps setting.

I’m now trying to get everything rearranged to best utilize the new space while also cutting down on the need to move files down the road again.  I want to be able to just upgrade a 500GB and not have to do all this moving between disk shares again.

I’ve also started using a new Media Center plugin called Video Library+.  It’s an XML metadata-driven (from theTVDB.com and movie-xml.com) MCML-based plugin for Vista only that was designed with TV series in mind, but also does movies.  It requires some fairly specific naming conventions due to the ruby scraper embedded, but it’s not all that bad.  I had to rename most all of my TV episodes, breaking them in MyMovies, but I never used MM for that anyway.  If renaming episodes scares you, then check out EpNamer - it’s the greatest little application ever (for this purpose anyway).

I had some difficulties getting it to work with my movie collection and eventually gave up, but if you’re just starting out or have a small collection, it’s definitely worth a try.

Although DHL delivered to the wrong address, I received my new enclosure and PCIe card yesterday. DHL notified me via SMS that my package had been delivered at 4:30pm EST yesterday. However, upon arriving at 5:30 - nothing was there. Nothing at my in-law’s (one neighbor) and nothing on the doorstep at my other neighbor’s (DHL notes stated it was left at the front door and, as far as I knew, my neighbor was at work all day - so it should have been there). I called DHL and they said they would contact me within 2 hours. Not long afterwards, my wife asks me if I’m blind and tells me there’s a box on the front porch. I also noticed my neighbor was now home - coincedence? Nope.

Anyway, I unpacked and inspected everything and it all looks as expected - very nice construction and quality products from PC-Pitstop.  The enclosure is pretty much the same as my first 4-bay enclosure, except that it includes a 5-in-3 hotswap cage, as opposed to the 4-in-3.  Here a couple of shots of the enclosure:

The PCI-e card is pretty standard and smaller than I expected, but I can’t really say what I was expecting otherwise.  It’s an unboxed/unbranded item based on the Sil3132 chipset, which is required for operation with the Sil3726 port multiplier in the enclosure.

Other than that, PC-Pitstop did include an eSATA cable (3ft or 6ft…I haven’t really looked yet) which is nice and a standard power cable was also included.

I’ve been really busy the past few weeks so I’m hoping I can get this stuff going by the weekend.  Hopefully I’ll find a little time each day to complete a few of the tasks needed (I still need to take the drives out of my old server - blah).

More to come, so check back often!

I finally got to order the enclosure, card and Pro upgrade to unRAID last night.  Roughly $420 of equipment for my unRAID server, but it is going to be sorely needed soon enough.  I just wish I had bought the Pro version when I first bought it…$60 to upgrade - yuck.  The only thing that keeps it from really bothering me is how well unRAID has done as my media server OS.

I’ve already received and installed the upgrade key, but I still need to reboot the server for it to take effect.  I’ll probably wait until everything arrives to do that - just in case there is another update between now and then.

I’m also starting to look at a new monitor option for my primary PC.  I’ve had a Dell Ultrasharp 2005FPW for nearly 3 years and, while I do love it, I want something bigger.  I’m actually considering a 26″ or 32″ 720p LCD HDTV.  The resolution isn’t going to be where the Dell is, but I don’t game and it may actually help with all the encoding I do.  If I can find something in the $450-500 range that I like, I might get one here shortly (my birthday is in a week and a half).  Buy.com has a 26″ Westinghouse that is $339.99 with free shipping.  The only problem I see is that there is no DVI and I’d rather not buy another DVI>HDMI cable.  It’s also a refurb, but this is the popular model that a firmware update was supposed to solve all issues with.  Their 32″
is only $429.99 with free shipping.  However, I think I’ll probably go with this KDS at Newegg for $399.99.  After shipping, I’m looking at about $425, which is pretty much my limit.  My son will get the Dell for his room as a TV and I can return the 21″ monster CRT to my server room KVM.  I can’t imagine a 26″ monitor.  My desktop calendar is 26″ - damn.

Well, hopefully by the end of this month I’ll have all this stuff running along.  Until then, I’ll post here as things happen about.

While I have quite a bit of collective space left on my unRAID array, I do not have much space left on a couple of the drives - so, I am about to purchase my second external enclosure for the server.  I want to maintain the same organization as I have now, but that leaves a couple of my drives at around 75-80% full, while the third is only at around 30%.   I have five 500GB drives sitting idle from my old media server, so I figure I should put them to use.

I will be purchasing an enclosure that is slightly different from my current one.  This one will support 5 drives and have a built-in port multiplier based on the Silicon Image 3726 chipset.  This will allow me to operate five drives on a single port multiplier capable SATA port.  The card I will be using is based on the Silicon Image 3124 chipset and has two eSATA ports.  This will give me expansion for up to 10 total drives.  Nice.  The case can be seen here and the this is the card.  The card is also PCIe, which won’t impact my bus bandwidth.  The only real downside is the single point of failure at the port multiplier module, but there are drawbacks to most everything.  The pluses outweigh all that to me.

I probably won’t put all five drives in there to begin with as I still intend on going to TB across the entire array.  I just don’t see a point in wasting those 500GB and I can’t think of any other use for them at the moment.  I’ll also have to upgrade my unRAID license to the Pro version as the Plus I currently have will only have room for one more drive.  I may actually get to try out the new cache drive option and use the IDE drive I currently have set aside for my NAS storage for that.  I’ll move that data to one of the 500GB drives.  I’m not sure how useful it will be to me yet though.  I’ll probably try it out just to have something to post about though.

Well, I’ll probably place my order after the long weekend since nothing will get done over it anyway.  My Amazon card payment needs to go through anyway - so, I’ll order Monday.  Hopefully I’ll get it in before next weekend.  Pics and posts will follow, so stay tuned!

Have a happy 4th!