HTPC storage

[Jagdish Gada]

Hello everyone,

I have a question here.Basically the requirement for my client's HTPC is to store 1,000 movie titles.So am asking is can i normally save this things on conventional hard drives? If so, how much storage space i have to allot

Any help is greatly received..
thanks..

[Rawko]

Perhaps you should think about the Western Digital GP line of drives. I upgraded from a 320GB Seagate 7200.10 to the 1TB WD GP drive and I love it. It's a 5400 rpm drive. HDTach benchmarks that I ran show that it is a little faster than the Seagate it replaced. The drive has been rated t as the quietest 3.5" drive they've ever tested and it's always on top for power consumption and low temps.And now coming to point You can use internal, external HDD or server to do what you want.You can use MM to do some of what you need to be.

[T.J.]

Considering that they will be direct rips from DVD's? Then it will be 4-8GB approx each movie. Or divx or any mp4 based codec at the optimum quality and it will be 1/4 th the size.I should expect my DVD rips to end up is truly 3-4gb each in size. I've been using Handbrake on my laptop to rip my DVDs to hard drive using the AppleTV canned settings, and they all play back tremendously on my AppleTV. I'd like to rip my collection, or at least a good portion of it, to the hard drive, but I'm trying to figure out how much HDD capacity I'll need.

[Killen]

You better using something a HTPC head with a dual channel u320 card in it, and 2 of these loaded up with 14 146GB SCSIs. It'll be supported with next day warranty which always a good thing for the client and can earn it with approximate 18k for two. and give you 8.4TB. you can add more enclosures as your wish.That 3-4gb is without encoding to divx, xvid, h.264, etc. Just straight ripping from the DVD. That translates to no quality loss and faster archiving time at the expense of storage space.If you convert your DVDs, then you can get much smaller files with marginal quality loss at the expense of hours of encoding time.