Picking hardware for Media Center

Storage - Hard drives

It may be a tautology, but Media Center is about media - MP3s, videos, TV. Media means files means space, and lots of it.

An hour of standard definition programming will take roughly 2GB of hard disk space recorded. If you already have 40 or 50GB of music that you want to be able to access, it doesn't take a genius to realise that you're going to need a fairly chunky hard drive to cater for all your media needs.

Space isn't everything, however - that space needs to be fast. It's no good having a slow hard drive when you're trying to write TV programmes to it and read MP3s off it at the same time, because you'll end up with stuttering left, right and centre. So, ideally, you want a fast, big drive. Unfortunately, this means no Western Digital Raptors, since while they're fast, they're only 76GB, which is utterly too small. Unless...

Unless, that is, you want to go for RAID. RAID means you're going to get an incredibly fast setup and you'll have absolutely no worries when it comes to disc access times. However, in a small form factor box, you're not going to get RAID because there won't be enough space. Twice the drives also means twice the heat and twice the noise, so unless you have some great thermal design going on, you're going to have overheating problems. Two Raptors will be like lightning, but it's going to be a challenge to keep things cool and quiet.

If you're buying a drive new, then there's no real reason not to go for SATA, if only because the cabling is so much neater and will be easier to manage in a small box. If you have an old PATA drive you can use, well, you will probably be fine.

In the end, we have to recommend something like the Samsung Spinpoint drives. A 200GB model is a nice size, and it's no slouch when it comes to access times either. Best of all - it's almost deadly silent. It was recommended to us by the chaps at QuietPC as being the quietest drive they've heard (or not, as the case may be). We've used a single 160GB for our system, meaning it will hold our 50GB of MP3s and still have room for 50 or so hours of TV recordings.

Storage - optical

This is a fairly easy choice. You can pick up dual-layer DVD writers for next to nothing these days, and there's really no reason why you'd want to use anything else (until Blu-Ray, anyway...) WMCE can write programmes to a drive for permanent storage, so it would be a shame not to have a writer in your system.

If you're using a very small system, you may find you have to use a laptop optical drive. These are expensive, but hey... you're getting a very slim form factor, so you pays your money, you takes your choice.

Optical drives are all pretty noisy, but again, QuietPC recommended us a NEC 3540A drive, which is what we've gone with. When making your choice, consider if the chassis you intend to build all this into has a replacement fascia for the drive to make it fit in with the front of the chassis. If it does, make sure the drive you are buying is compatible with the fitting used! The NEC is one of the drives recommend for use with the Arisetek chassis we've chosen (more on that in a moment...)