Atom based motherboard and a Sata expansion

[SoundTheSurrender]

I want to build a power conscious media system.

Initially I want to get this motherboard.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16813153122 + a IDE hard drive

+ x2 Terabyte SATA drives in a software raid. Once these fill up, I want to get 2 more.

If those get filled up I would like to use a SATA PCI card.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16815124006

Would this be over the top for a small motherboard? I don't want to use something that is so resource heavy. The whole point of it is just to stream stuff to my Xbox 360.

 

[Zap]

Ummm, would probably be fine.

An alternative would be to use a separate motherboard that has a bunch of SATA ports on-board and the lowest end E5200 CPU. It would hardly use more power than the Atom setup because while the Atom uses very little power, the 945GC that Intel saddles it with uses around 8x the power of the Atom CPU. You can get a G45 chipset micro ATX or mini ITX board that uses a lot less power than the 945GC, and an E5200 CPU that uses more power... which will almost but not quite balance it out. The separate mobo/CPU will end up costing more and taking maybe 5-10W more idle, and probably closer to 40W more under load, but it will save you from having to buy the separate SATA card plus it will be a lot more powerful in case you want to use it for anything else. Heck, get a G45 chipset board with HDMI and use it as an HTPC as well!

 

[Blain]

While I love the idea of the small form factor, low wattage, dual core Atom, I can't get over how limited the MBs are.
A HTPC should be a place where the Atom could shine. But the limited expansion make it an overcast proposition.

 

[SoundTheSurrender]

Thanks, I will look other motherboards.

I really like those Atom motherboards because of how integrated they are... like I said, I don't care how dynamic it is, it's just going to be running XP and streaming video to my 360.