I got 8 Maxtor 4A300J0 drives @ 5400. Picked them up from CompUSA for $239 during a mail-in rebate thing they had going on last month.
I'm running RAID5 so I loose 300GB to parity, but like you say, given the 2TB limit, that worked out pretty good. Btw, windows report my dynamic shared volume at 2,099,996,200,960 bytes, so it looks like I overcame the 2TB limit somehow.
I boot from a seperate drive that contains just XP and apps.
I ran some test on my RAID5, and here are my numbers:
Sequential Read 74.4 MBytes/Sec
Sequential Write 29.2 MBytes/Sec
Random Seek + RW 4.5 Mbytes/Sec
This was when I was running the 3ware in a P3 800 board. If we round the sequential read to 80MB/s (640Mb/s) out of the raid, barring other bottlenecks (PCI bus and Ethernet I/O) I should be able to transfer:
32 average HDTV streams (at 20Mb/s), or
23 high-quality HDTV streams (at 27Mb/s), or
106 average DVDs (at 6Mb/s), or
71 high-quality DVDs (at 9Mb/s), or
2500 average mp3s (at 256kb/s), or
444 uncompressed audio CDs (at 1.441Mb/s)
If the 3ware card is plugged into a 64bit/66MHz PCI slot, and you have integrated Gigabit Ethernet that doesn't ride the PCI bus, you just might be able to dump 640Mb/s to a 1Gb/s switch and then feed clients from there.
I haven't really had a chance to stress test the system yet since I'm still waiting on my 1Gb/s switch, but things run real well over my current 100Mb/s switched network (3Com Superstack II switch).
I'm seeing maybe 3% network utilization when streaming a DVD to a client, I would not anticipate any problems with a half dozen streams which would be the most I could ever imagine streaming at once.
When moving 50GB across the 100Mb/s connection, network utilization goes to 75-80%, but cpu remains less than 5%. And it does not affect the ability of the server to stream lossless audio and/or video to a htpc client.
The 1Gb/s switch will be shared between the server and the workstations that I use to rip from. The media clients (htpcs) will remain connected to the current 100Mb/s switch which in turns connects to the 1Gb/s switch.
Yes, MC9 lives on the server along with a pair of M-Audio 24/96 DiOs and the built-in SP/DIF on the motherboard. This gives me 3 SP/DIF zones and 2 analog zones.
I talk to the server from my airpanel running the Lobby suite. From here I can launch DVDLobby and tell it to launch a movie on one of the htpcs. Or I can just launch MC9 and start different playlists to any of the 5 zones that eminate from the rack closet. I can also launch MC9 on any of the media clients and they then connect to the main MC9 library on the server. I can also launch any member of the lobby suite from these clients if I don't want to fetch the airpanel and control it that way.
It should be noted that you can't remote desktop directly to one of the clients if your intent is to launch something on the local display. The thinsoft folks I mentioned earlier well sell a single license client to allow remote desktop access to a single client while preseving the local session.
I like the ATI cards myself. Since the server isn't normally connected to a monitor, it just got some old AGP card in it, a Voodo5 I think. I run a Pro-9700 MP-1 in my main htpc, and a 9200 in the htpc connected to a rear projector via s-video. I'm not pleased with the s-video of this card, and have been told ATI aren't know for s-video quality. Anyway, likely not a concern in your case.
I don't have any regrets from going the XP route vs. linux or 2003 server. My environment is very stable, and I haven't had any hardware conflicts/issues.
I'm running a 2.8Ghz P4c with a Zalman 7000Cu heatsink and Kingston Hyper-X PC 3500. I will likely play a little with overclocking, since I should be able to remain very stable deep into the 3GHz range. MC9 will really snap then when reloading panes with my 30,000+ collection.
Anyhow, glad you're finding my info helpfull.