MCE 2005 & FOUR x 250GB Hard Disks?

Big.Wayne

Big.Wayne

Big.Wayne

Soldato
Joined
11 Sep 2003
Posts
14,716
Location
London
Hi,

I'm finally about to start putting together a media centre PC for a friend/client who has asked for 1TB of storage. Due to the price sweet spot I have picked up four x Hitachi 250GB disks, but was wondering what the best way to set these up would be?

I'm not sure how Media centre handles different disks, like could I have one for music, one for photos and the other two for DVD rips and DivX's and have all the media available in one central interface in MCE or does everything have to be on one actual drive?

The mobo I am using has a few RAID options so I have the option to combine all four disks as one *large* RAID-0 drive which isn't such a bad option (Raid-0 with four disks must be fast!!!!, but of course there is the associated risk from having just one drive fail etc).

Any feedback appreciated :)
 
If you just have them seperate and then get XP to default "My Music" to one of tyhe drivers, "My Videos" to the other and whatnot, then it should just detect them, or you could jsut add them manually. I haven't used MCE much so take my advice with a dab of sugar.
 
We had a TB server for a while

One of the drives was 250gb and partioned from A-Z. WMC can then index them alphabetically. So all films starting with A go in A partition, etc
 
Raid : 0 with 4 drives would be asking for trouble, and the peformance increase would be hardly noticable in MCE. I would just keep them all seperate to be honest, MCE will have no problems with that at all. You can set up all your entry points for video/recorded tv etc whereever you like.
 
MCE can access files from different drives no problems, just add folders access in the MC menus

Although I would recommend you install Media Portal instead of Media Centre/front end. Media Portal is much more powerful, I use it for my HTPC now. Media Portal can also use multiple directories/drives, it's just in the configuration menu.

I would go for 320GB's, they offer best £ per GB.
 
Last edited:
it was more like 20 partitions as we didnt have many movies starting with Q,X,Y and Z. they were grouped together PQR and XYZ

Good luck with it, we used PM
 
def not a good idea to use raid for this

mce wont benefit at all from it, besides boot time will be a bit quicker

vidoes take like 1 second to open max anyway, raid will just make it a timebomb ready to be set off!

you can specify folders on any drive (including network drives) for mce to use

the best way to set it up is to have a small drive for the os, and have the media stored on a network, so you get zero hard drive noise when using it
 
the best way to set it up is to have a small drive for the os, and have the media stored on a network, so you get zero hard drive noise when using it
Click to expand...

The light "tick tick tick" access during movie/file playback won't be noticeable. Yup NAS/file server is great would like it myself but hard drives in the HTPC isn't that bad. Not like defragging HD noise.
 
since you say you use media portal..

can you do a 'play all' in a subfolder of videos?

that really annoys me in mce..

also the dangerous 'delete' after playback is so dumb!, made sure it was read only before i let anyone else use my mce box!
 
Hi,

thanks for helpful replies all :)

It's gonna be built using a Silverstone LC20M and housed just outside the room, lumped in a purpose built A/V rack. The viewing area is about 15-20 feet away so I don't think the noise will be a problem.

Sounds like I can just have four seperate hard disks then, I may partition the first one into 40GB [system] and 200GB [photos] and have the second disk as [audio] and the last two as [film01] and [film02], I was just concerned that if all the media wasn't on the same disk MCE would display it all as available. . .

Everything is bought and sitting here, gonna start real soon :)
 
I like the MC "delete after watch"(I delete watched episodes after) although I can see why you wouldn't want that. I think it puts it in recycle bin so no big deal. Not sure if MP it has play all feature.

Do try out Media Portal, you can add your own plugins. You can install MC, but use Media Portal as the front end. Switch and swop and finally decide which is better. I settled on MP. MC works fine but MP has more configurability.
 
Last edited:
There is no need to RAID 0 these disks, as they are fast enough and doing that would increase the disaster should one fail.

What you should do is get 5 disks, and set up a RAID 5 system which will give decent performance, and redundancy, which means if one disk goes down, you can get another, plug it in and rebuild the array without losing data. you could do it with 4 disks but you would have only 750 gig. usable space.

I am doing a similar thing but with 5x 160 gig disks, giving me 640gig usable space. I also have another 2x 200 gig for backup.

ninja edit < zomg i spelt losing as loosing.> shame.
 
4 x SATA Disks

Has anybody here installed MCE 2005 into a system that has four (sata) hard disks installed? :confused: :o

1000gbaxv6.jpg



1000gbbdq3.jpg
 
Big.Wayne said:
Has anybody here installed MCE 2005 into a system that has four (sata) hard disks installed?{snip}
Click to expand...
MCE IS Windows XP Professional (even your 2nd screenshot shows) :p Did you hit C ('C=Create Partition')? Need to do that first! But personally, I'd 'invest' in Acronis Disk Director (here) :)

mypartitionsao5.jpg


Afterwards, simply point your software (WMP, Winamp, Media Center, RealPlayer, etc) to search/rip/etc to specific drive or partition! E.g. have my music on E:, videos & for ripping on F: :cool:
 
Last edited:
Just from my experience with MCE - I had problems with LiveTV performance when using a RAID-1 array as the recording disk. Quite a lot of stutter in the video - went away when I moved recording to a single disk. However, this was a little while ago on an nForce3 mobo, so hopefully not a problem now...
 
Big.Wayne said:
1000gbbdq3.jpg
Click to expand...
hp7909 said:
Did you hit C ('C=Create Partition')? Need to do that first!
Click to expand...
Hi, firstly you don't need to hit 'C' first (unless you wanna make cutom partition) you normally just select the drive you wanna install windows on and press enter, at this stage the installer just makes a single primary partition and offers up the formatting choices. However in this case it wasn't doing that, it just offered to take me back to the select drive screen?


squiffy said:
What's the problem? Just continue with the install.
Click to expand...
lol the problem was i couldn't continue with the install, it was one step forward, one step back?

Strange thing was it worked as expected on the third drive down in the list, it allowed me to hit 'C' and make some partitions, once that was done it then allowed me to create partitions on the other drives and format them as normal, however something still wasn't right?? when I got MCE2005 installed and looked in My computer the drives were in a strange order, the letters were very random? after a while trying to install certain software it started throwing error messages at me saying things like C:\boot.ini cannot be opened etc?

I had a look and sure enough it wasn't there for some reason half of windows had been installed on the C:\ drive and some other files had been installed omn the f:\ drive?

Anyway I got it all sorted now, lots of head scratching and late nights needed! I think it was some kinda bug on my nForce4 platform when installing windows with 4x SATA hard disks in the system . . . What I had too do was 'disable' half of the sata controllers, so only two disks were visable and it worked as expected. First time round I disabled SATA 3&4, but after the install was finished and I then re-enabled the remaining SATA ports (1&2) when I got back into windows and looked in Disk-Managmant it seemed windows was on the third drive down (not a biggy but not as I expected) so started all over again from fresh but this time I disabled SATA 1&2 leaving 3&4 enabled, did the install (perfect) and then re-enabled SATA 1&2 again and all is perfect!! :o :p :cool:
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom