I have been mulling over some options for my system here, and I 'd like to make an HTPC, in a sense. I'll actually be using a 32" LCD (yes I convinced the wife!) as my PC monitor and for movies (we don't have cable, just rabbit ears). So I have been thinking about wireless options and firewire, none of which seem appealing to me because I like to have speed and reliability, but I'd like to hear your experiences.
I have a firewire enclosure but the PCI card I was using needed replacement before I could really use it. I popped an HD in the enclosure and things were running really slow; I later assumed it was because of the bad PCI card (anything 5.15volts or lower on the 5v rail would lock the PC or prevent boot).
In a fast PC that is rigged for stability & speed w/ 1GB of memory, and decent mem bandwith, 400mHz, what kind of performance can I expect from firewire hard drives?
I was thinking of setting up a media server, but it sounds slow even at 125mb with Afterburner enabled on my Sveasoft firmware, and what if I have a lot of traffic bogging down my network; VoiP, uploads, downloads, etc.
I have pretty much ruled out any wireless solution except in the future using the MC11 UPnP server to stream to a Terratec Noxon.
Lastly, I need to have my EMU1212M near my analog archiving rig so it would work nicely to build an HTPC that would actually house my current rig. I am used to the speed of my WD 10000rpm Raptor hard drive and thought it would be nice to have two of them on a RAID 0 array, but that means a new motherboard (yes I am getting greedy).
My current setup is silent, and I am afraid even with low volting fans and good heatsinks etc. I will still heat up the system with something like 4 HD's (especially w/ 2 Raptors) and a hot ATI9800. Firewire would solve some problems in this regard because I could keep my current setup and just add a 500GB external, but only if it would be somewhat fast with read/writes. I have spent 2 years with this DFI motherboard and tweaked the OS (which is the only thing on the Raptor until it was perfect; I have been saving an image and occasionally re-flashing at problem times for two years...it's hard to let go when you get something like Window$ to run stable and efficient.
Guess I am just talking out loud here, but I know there are MANY folks here who will some great input.
thanks,
Jon