After the holidays I plan on replacing my lovely HTPC. It's an ASRock ION 3D with 2 2TB USB 3.0 disks attached to it.
I like the ASRock, it does everything I want, albeit somewhat slow sometimes (downloading and decompressing for instance). It cannot transcode or other cpu intensive tasks.
The reason I want to replace it is because the 2 USB 3 drives do not support sleep. They never spin down and even when I turn the HTPC off, the disks keep on spinning. The ASRock is not meant to be a homeserver but it does somewhat function as one as well and I use it to backup stuff to as well.
I could get me a fancy NAS, but they are so incredibly overpriced. It's basically 125 dollars per drive bay. There are some cheaper than that but the speeds they reach are slower than my internet connection. A fast NAS is too expensive IMO and comes with less processing power and flexibility than a home server. Also, when I look at the web interfaces and configuration I get the impression much of it is still in beta rather than being finished products (like many media streamers). Support continuity is also a problem; I don't like risking a manufacturer dropping support for a model because they don't have or want to spend resources on a 2 year old NAS model and rather focus on their newest and latest model. Last but not least, the homeserver I listed below is less power hungry than a typical 4 bay NAS.
So this is something I'm thinking about. The case has 5 3,5" bays and allows for conversion of the 5,25" bays for 4 more 3,5" bays. I could expand it at a later stage with a good hardware SATA 600 RAID controller. The socket 1155 can be replaced with an i3, i5 or even i7 sandy bridge for more horsepower.
By the time I build it MSI may have a newer version of that mainboard that supports Ivy Bridge. In that case I'd go for that.
| # | Product | Price | Subtotal |
| 1 | Intel Pentium G620 | € 50,90 | € 50,90 |
| 1 | Xigmatek Asgard II | € 33,30 | € 33,30 |
| 1 | Antec Earthwatts EA-380D Green | € 42,19 | € 42,19 |
| 1 | Crucial m4 CT128M4SSD2 128GB | € 106,06 | € 106,06 |
| 1 | Team Elite 2 x 4 GB DDR3 1333 Mhz | € 38,40 | € 38,40 |
| 1 | MSI B75MA-P45 | € 59,95 | € 59,95 |
| Totaal | € 330,80 | |
What I'm wondering about is what pros and cons you folks would see in this over a dedicated HTPC and separate NAS or even keeping the ASRock and add this as a server? This thing should be as silent as it can get so I could comfortably replace the HTPC with it in my Home Theater in the living room.
Also, I'm very interested in running ESXi (or Microsoft Hyper-V, I have the licenses). If I were to put an i7 in there at a later stage with 16GB (or 32 if possible) memory, how would a HTPC work as a virtual appliance on a hypervisor and would bitperfect audio output still be possible? Hardware accellerated video playback? Does anyone have any experience with that?
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Topic: Planning a new HTPC (Read 4423 times)