James45 said:
I know of one recent high end setup with 5.5Tb of backed up storage!
How about
this James !
10+TB of storage using a coolermaster stacker 801 case with 4 5into3 cooled hotswap bays with 20!! 500gb drives!! He backs up essential files to a 3+TB system based on a Nortek case media server case. Obviously doesn't mind re-ripping in the event of a HD failure.
INCREDIBLE!!
So my plan is thus.
11 year old Sony 32in WS FX20 CRT in the living room gets replaced by a 42in 720p HD ready Plasma. 5 year old Cheapo Philips 28in WS CRT in the kitchen/diningroom gets replaced by 32in 720p HD ready LCD. AE900 in dedicated Cinema room doesn't get replaced because it is great
Xbox 360 connected to PJ that currently spends as much if not more time doing extender duties streaming xvids from main PC in the Living room as playing games gets relegated to purely gaming duties. Why not use 360's as extenders for all the screens?? Well, they are noisey buggers in my experience and most stuff, ie movie rips and xvids must be transcoded afaik and that unfortunately puts all the processing demands on the main MCE machine rather than on the individual 360 CPU's. Stutter city if I am watching 720p in the cinema room while someone is streaming a dvd to the kitchen while someone else wants to watch some anime xvid in the Living room. Yes our house can get that busy audio-visually!
Assorted junk in the cupboard under the stairs gets moved and the cupboards new resident will be a 10tb Mass Media storage server linked to above. While I would only be ripping the main title and english 5.1 soundtrack, my 700+ dvds add up to nearly 6TB. While I know it would take a few weeks, I would like nothing better than to have them
all backed up to the server along with every DIVX/XVID file I have and playable on any screen in the house at the touch of a button with My movies MCE plug-in.
The 3 final links in the chain would be a Media Centre PC for every screen. Local storage space not being a deciding issue
2 x
Acer idea 500 MCE Pc's which are getting great reviews, for the 42in Plasma in the Living room and the 32in LCD in the Kitchen/diner.
This little....actually very very big beauty would go in the Cinema room. Its an
Origen HTPC case with built in Touch screen. Perfect for saving Projector lamp hours when you just want to play music or setup a recording. We go through a 5000 hour Panny PJ bulb every 15 months. This expensive case would pay for itself over its lifetime.
While the acers in the other rooms are slim, discreet and quiet they are powerful enough to stream and play 720p if required. Hey maybe those laptop core duo's might, just might be able to run some ffdshow sharpening filters alongside their upscaling duties too. The behemoth that is the origen however is big enough to accept the latest greatest conroe core 2 and decent Graphics cards and keep them cool. That will deffo be running all sorts of filters to improve upscaled dvd PQ for the PJ and should be capable of playing any of the latest games at 720p.
I plan to start setting all this up....................
..............when I win the lottery!
Hey we can all dream cant we!!
Bfrost, you have the kind of integrated setup that I would aspire to.
If I ever come into a few spare quid or I get an unexpected bonus I'll be onto you for advice mate!