Silent Power Supplies

[ptmuldoon]

I've started buying some components for a HTPC, and wondering if anyone has any recommendations for silent/quite power supplies? I think I'll need something in the 700-750w range, as I'll be adding higher end graphics cards, and a number of HDs to the machine for recordings and storage of music.

After some searching, I was considering this Themaltake PS. Any thoughts or recommendations.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153039

[oracleguy]

Unless you are going to be running some combination of dual quad core processors, SLI, or 8 hard drives, you don't need a 700 watt power supply. A HTPC doesn't need a ton of graphics power since it is just outputs video to the screen and running the interface program. There are fanless power supplies you can buy though.

However usually in a HTPC if you have a good quiet case, the power supply isn't want generates the most noise, its the vibrations from the hard drives and the CPU and/or extra case fans.

[ptmuldoon]

It will a dual core processor, E8400 chip, with DFI bloodiron board.

For now, I'm really worried about the cooling factor (as well as noise), and purchased an Antec 900 case.

It will likely have 6 HD's and 2 optical drives in it. This will be my first time doing a raid setup, and I'm thinking of having 3 arrays of 2 drives each. 2 small HD's for the OS, and then another 2 arrays for data.

Plus I'm looking at a higher end graphic cards to stream live HD content to a 60" plasma. I'm also told that an approximate 1 hour of HD recordings takes about 7gig, so I expect drive space may go quickly.

[FishMonger]

It will likely have 6 HD's and 2 optical drives in it. This will be my first time doing a raid setup, and I'm thinking of having 3 arrays of 2 drives each. 2 small HD's for the OS, and then another 2 arrays for data.

I think you mean 2 arrays of 3 drives each.

If you have the proper case and some extra money, I'd go with 8 drives (in hot swap bays) and do RAID 10 (stripping with mirroring). You could either put 4 drives in each array, or 3 drives and 1 spare that is configured to automatically become an active member of the array if a drive fails. However, this type of setup is probably far more than you need.

I'm also told that an approximate 1 hour of HD recordings takes about 7gig, so I expect drive space may go quickly.What size of drives were you planning on using? 3 400gig drives per array would give you plenty of space.

[oracleguy]

For long term storage I would recommend a hardware RAID 5 or 6 array, for short term DVR storage, I would recommend RAID 0 (if you even need RAID at all, a 500gb drive will give you more than enough temporary storage even at 7GB/hour). If a drive fails in your RAID 0 array, sure you lose all the data on all the drives but you only lose your short term storage. For long term you'll want something with fault tolerance (e.g. 5 or 6).

The way I setup my HTPC up is that it has some space for short term storage (one hard drive) for the DVR functionality and the thing is dead silent. When I'm not using it, if the case didn't have a power LED on it, you wouldn't know its on. It works well that way being in the living room. Then I have a separate server that has a RAID 5 array that I use for my long term video storage. The server is then just a mount point on the HTPC so I can still watch anything on my server on it.