I'm planning a HTPC build, and right now I am planning to use this motherboard, or probalby something similar.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157195
Most motherboards now seem to come with raid support in the bios, so I am planning to use that, and to setup raid 1 (mirroring) using 2x2TB Hard drives. The HTPC is mostly going to be used for playing video via HDMI on a tv. The most demanding video task will likely be playing 1080p .mkv files (usually 10GB to 20GB in size), and nothing is really going to be written to the drives where write performance matters, I don't plan to capture any TV or anything like that.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think that Raid 1 is normally slower for writes, but reads are similar to a single drive? So I'm wondering if a raid 1 setup as I am planning here would cause a problem playing the large 1080p mkv files that I plan to play.
Assuming the raid 1 setup will work, I'm looking for recommendations as to which 2TB hard drives I should use for this setup. I see different types of Western Digital Caviar Green drives ranging from $80-$120, also Samsung and HITACHI drives.
Should I be looking to use 7200rpm or 5400rpm, and does the 32MB vs 64MB cache matter? I was told the 5400rpm drives may be more stable over time, I'm just wondering if they would cause any performance issues playing back the big mkv files I would need to use them for. Also since I may have raid 1 setup, if a drive did fail, it would not be that big of a deal. Any advice or recommendations on these things would be helpful.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16813157195
Most motherboards now seem to come with raid support in the bios, so I am planning to use that, and to setup raid 1 (mirroring) using 2x2TB Hard drives. The HTPC is mostly going to be used for playing video via HDMI on a tv. The most demanding video task will likely be playing 1080p .mkv files (usually 10GB to 20GB in size), and nothing is really going to be written to the drives where write performance matters, I don't plan to capture any TV or anything like that.
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but I think that Raid 1 is normally slower for writes, but reads are similar to a single drive? So I'm wondering if a raid 1 setup as I am planning here would cause a problem playing the large 1080p mkv files that I plan to play.
Assuming the raid 1 setup will work, I'm looking for recommendations as to which 2TB hard drives I should use for this setup. I see different types of Western Digital Caviar Green drives ranging from $80-$120, also Samsung and HITACHI drives.
Should I be looking to use 7200rpm or 5400rpm, and does the 32MB vs 64MB cache matter? I was told the 5400rpm drives may be more stable over time, I'm just wondering if they would cause any performance issues playing back the big mkv files I would need to use them for. Also since I may have raid 1 setup, if a drive did fail, it would not be that big of a deal. Any advice or recommendations on these things would be helpful.
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