It if were me, I would go with an SATA optical like bjenkins suggested. I have a feeling in won't be long before even that single IDE port is gone and 32 bucks ain't bad. I have never used any of the PATA to SATA converters and I have never read about any problems with them (but then again I have never really looked for any real performance type reviews either). This is just my .02 worth though of course. Oh and running the OS on an SATA is not a problem. My server currently uses a 100 GB SATA drive for OS. I had no problems with it whatsoever.
Edit: As for NIC's, I use the onboard Gigabit contorller. My server is hooked to a 26 port Switch (24 10/100 ports and 2 Gigabit ports) and runs at GB speeds so that my HDHomerun isn't hogging a lot of the bandwidth of my NIC (if recording 2 HD shows, it can use as much as 40mb/s). I really recommend anyone who plans to use an HDHomerun to use a gigabit NIC hooked into a gigabit switch of some type that way plenty of bandwidth is available to your clients.
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Sage Server: AMD Athlon II 630, Asrock 785G motherboard, 3GB of RAM, 500GB OS HD in RAID 1 and 2 - 750GB Recording Drives, HDHomerun, Avermedia HD Duet & 2-HDPVRs, and 9.0TB storage in RAID 5 via Dell Perc 5i for DVD storage
Source: Clear QAM and OTA for locals, 2-DishNetwork VIP211's
Clients: 2 Sage HD300's, 2 Sage HD200's, 2 Sage HD100's, 1 MediaMVP, and 1 Placeshifter
Last edited by paulbeers; 05-23-2007 at 07:11 PM.
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