New Server - advice

[tmiranda]

My current Sage server is getting long in the tooth and I'm getting ready to build a new server. I'd appreciate any comments or suggestions you may have.

My design considerations:
- I view exclusively on extenders, 2 HD-100's and one MVP. The MVP is rarely used so I'm not overly concerned about transcoding performance.
- My Sage server stays on 24x7 so I'd like to lower the power consumption.
- To further reduce power consumption and also to simplify my network, I'd like to eliminate the NAS I currently use to store almost all of my Sage recordings. (I have a seperate NAS used to store movies and backups. This NAS only gets turned on when needed.)
- I don't need RAID for my recorded TV. If a drive crashes life goes on. (Anything critical get's backed up to the NAS.)
- The server runs ComSkip and ComSkip Monitor.
- I'd like to be able to go through one "upgrade cycle" with the server. (Probably upgrade the CPU and RAM.)
- I have a HDHR and a nVidia Dual TV capture card that I will reuse. I also have an older PVR-150 that I may or may not reuse.

Here is what I'm considering:

Case: Antec 300. It's roomy, cool, holds a lot of 3.5" drives (and has fans to cool them), fits into the space I have available, and is inexpensive.

Power supply: PC Power and Cooling Silencer 750 that I bought for $75 (very cheap for a top-of-the-line power supply.)

Storage: 2 Seagate 1.5TB drives ($99 each from Dell!) and 2x300GB and 2x500GB SATA drives from the NAS I'm going to decommission.

Optical: LITE-ON DVD-ROM. Maybe I'll add Blu-Ray in the future.

MB: ASUS P5QL-CM. It's not fancy but it has onboard video and NIC (keeps things simple for me) and supports 6 SATA + 2 PATA devices. I'm looking for stability and the ability to support future (faster) CPUs as the price decreases.

CPU: Intel C2D E8400 Wolfdale. It's the cheapest 65 Watt CPU with a 1333 MHz FSB. I figure a 65W CPU will help to reduce power consumption and the 1333MHz FSB (coupled with the MB I choose) will give it good performance and leaves me a good CPU upgrade path.

CPU Questions:
- Will I see a big performance drop if I go with something like the E7400 vs. the E8400? It's about $50 cheaper than the E8400, runs at 2.8 GHz (vs. 3.0) and has a 1066 MHz FSB (vs. 1333 MHz)? The E6300 is cheaper yet and has the same specs as the E7400 except it uses the older "Dual-Core" architecture.
- Will I see any performance improvement if I go with the Q8200 vs. the E8400? It's about the same price, has the same FSB speed, runs at 2.33GHz (vs. 3.0) but is quad core (vs. dual core). It's also uses 95W (vs. 65W)

Memory: 2 x 2GB Kingston HyperX DDR2 1066 RAM. Do the Hauppauge drivers still dislike systems with 4GB RAM?

OS: WinXP.

Whaddaya think?

Tom

[Lucas]

Looks good. I just went through the same exercise myself.

Don't worry too much about the CPU. I moved a 6550 from my dismantled SageTV client PC and it rocks.

My NASs are now my media library backup. I just turn them on once a month to backup new video files from the server.

The power savings should be good.

[valnar]

The E7400 will still be plenty fast enough for background Sage server duties, like comskip and MVP transcoding. I believe it will also consume slightly less power because of the 3Mb vs 6Mb cache (on die cache increases power use in CPU's). However, if you envision playing with VMWare with VT-x, get the E8400.

I would not get a quad-core. The dual is fine for Sage server duties. It generates less heat uses less power.

If you use fast RAM like that, it will take more power. DDR2-800 is more than enough.

Motherboard: Well... are you sure you want to limit yourself to a micro-atx motherboard especially considering this will just be a server and not directly attached to your TV? (so size doesn't matter, right?) You might be better served by a full-ATX motherboard and just put in a cheap $10 PCI video card so you have some extra slots for future tuners.

And speaking of slots, if you did buy that motherboard, you'd want to use up the PCIe slot for an Intel gigabit NIC. The onboard NIC of the ASUS P5QL-CM is pretty crappy (just a Realtek.) If you are using the HDHR tuner, it matters.

Every single component of an HTPC or related server is important and should be hand picked to get the desired result.


Edit: I just recommended this ASUS motherboard to a friend of mine who is building a back-end Sage server. It has a good cross selection of PCI and PCIe slots. It comes with firewire which may be important in the future if you envision needing firewire tuning to a STB. Has IDE and plenty of SATA ports too. (I still recommend a PCIe Intel NIC). Since it's an ASUS P5Q series, you can also play with the cablecard hack if you so desire.

[Olias]

I second Valnar's comments.
You also mentioned possibly upgrading the CPU and memory some time in the future. I think the board you picked out only has two memory slots and a max capacity of 4GB, so you're already maxed out there. Since Intel will soon be pushing it's i5 CPUs there may not be many or any new options to increase CPU speed.
Although for what it will be doing a current CPU (E7400) should be fine.

If power consumption is one of you concerns, consider dropping a pair of the lower capacity drives. I know it's hard not to use what you've got, but are all six drives really needed? (This comment comes from a guy with eight drives on his server. Do as I say, not as I do...)

[tmiranda]

Valnar, Olias - Thanks for the comments.

I looked at that motherboard but decided to compromise on the -CM. I didn't realize the -CM used the Realtek NIC so I might regret my decision.

I went for the faster E8400 because I might use the machine to convert some of my DVD collection to H.264.

I will drop a pair of the lower capacity drives when I have more $$

[Djc208]

Good luck with the hardware.

I do want to throw out a suggestion to consider using WHS instead of XP Pro. WHS has some nice features, like the system backup and drive pooling, even if I didn't put my recording drives into the pool. I just switched and didn't have any major problems converting from XP Pro.

[ohpleaseno]

The Antec 300 is what my current server is in and it is on 24/7. With the 4 fans my drives never even get hot or warm. Great case.

I'll give another nod to considering WHS over WinXP. It just works so much better when it runs as a service inside WHS.

[tmiranda]

I'm considering WHS but my budget is already maxed out. I have a copy of WinXP and Vista but I do not have WHS and I'm not into pirating.

[tahoetim]

If i were in your shoes, I would drop one or both of the 1.5's and get WHS for $99 from the get go. It's easy to add drives to the pool later. Hard drive prices will only go down, not up. I built mine with 3 500's and have tons of room to spare. By the time I fill up the 2 500's in the pool, the 1T's will be $50 or less

[tmiranda]

I spent Sunday assembling this system and installing Sage. My observations:

- The Antec 300 is superb. The only complaint is that the fans are loud if you set them on high.

- The ASUS motherboard is very solid. Lot's of options and flexibility in the BIOS.

- The system is very quick, it smokes the E521 that it replaced.

- My system is not that complicated, I use the stock STV with four STVi/plugins (webserver, ComSkip playback, Tiki fanart, stuckless fanart) and yet configuration was very tedious. I copied the wiz.bin and the "clients" folder from the original setup so many (but not all) of the settings were preserved and yet I spent hours tweaking and it's still not complete. It would be nice if Sage and the various add-ons all stored config info in one central place or Sage had away to "export and import" the settings.

- I read that the Hauppauge drivers had "issues" when running on systems with 4GB RAM yet my old PVR-150 seems to be doing just fine. I'm not sure if I am lucky or just have not run into the inevitable problems.

- The HDHR is not configured yet so I do not know if the NIC will be an issue.