HTPC hardware

[brad]

On Tue, 2003-11-25 at 15:12, Jonathan Hutchins wrote:

> In order to get speed, you want RAID 5, striping.  All of the motherboards 
> I've seen only do mirroring, only between two drives.  I'm not sure about the 
> PCI cards, but those I've seen were all mirror-only and I suspect that it's 
> generally true.  However, a good IDE drive should be sufficient for what you 
> need, unless you're doing multiple streams to disk at the same time.
> 
RAID 0 is also striping, just without fault tolerance.  Most of the
onboard controllers I have seen will do RAID 0,1,or 0+1.  I don't need
fault tolerance as this is just multimedia stuff.  Also, with RAID 5 you
lose total disk space and with RAID 0 you don't.  I will more than
likely have multiple data streams going at once (recording tv, watching
tv, recording 2 webcam feeds, and serving mp3's and webcam feeds to the
network).  Not likely that all of those will be in use at the same time,
but RAID 0 can DRASTICALLY increase read/write speeds from what I read.