first time builder, please review. any help would be appreciated

[gschnider]

This is my first build and I just wanted to post here to see if anyone can take a look at my plan and help out a little. A few things to mention - I'm not using this for gaming - it's strictly a HTPC. I have about 7 hard drives that I'm going to configure into a RAID so I needed a case with lots of bays and cooling, additionally I needed a MOBO with lots of SATA ports.

Power - Antec CP-850 850 Watt CPX Power Supply Unit for Antec Twelve Hundred, P183 and P193 - $109 - Amazon

Case - Antec Twelve Hundred ATX 12 Drive Bays 2xUSB 2.0 eSATA Audio Full Tower Case - $159 - Amazon

Graphics - Sapphire Radeon HD 5770 1 GB DDR5 Dual DVI-I / HDMI / DP PCI-Express Graphics Card 100283L - $179 - Amazon

MOBO - P7P55D-E Pro P55 LGA1156 MAX-16GB DDR3 Atx 2PCIE16 3PCIE8 - $194 - Amazon

Processor - Intel Core i7 Processor 2.80 GHz 8 MB LGA1156 CPU I7-860BOX - $279 - Amazon

Memory - CORSAIR XMS3 DHX 4GB ( 2 X 2GB ) PC3-10666 1333MHz 240-pin DDR3 CL9 Dual Channel Desktop Memory Kit - TW3X4G1333C9DHX​ - $111 - Amazon

Blu ray - LG Electronics CH08LS10 LightScribe SATA Blu-ray Combo Drive, Retail (Black) - $121 - Amazon

OS - Windows 7

Please let me know what you think, thanks.

[orbrit]

I have to ask, why are you going to configure 7 hard drives in RAID - especially using software as opposed to a hardware RAID controller?

Do you need that much storage or do you need the redundancy?
Windows 7 (Pro, Ultimate) only supports RAID 0 and 1 so I assume that you are going for increased storage - with 7 drives. The home version does not support dynamic disks at all.

In that case, why risk losing your entire array to a failed drive?

Are the 7 drives you have the same speed, capacity, firmware etc.?

EDIT to add:
and i think the 5770 is overkill for a HTPC.

[gschnider]

orbit - thanks for the reply. I was under the assumption, might be wrong, that creating a raid array was the best method to secure your data. I was debating between that and just using software to create back-up images on a weekly basis. I thought in a RAID system, if one drive failed, the data was protected on the other drives and you just needed to replace that one failed drive. 6 drives are 1tb SATA 7200, one drive is 1.5tb SATA 7200.

Would you suggest something different for the 5770?

[orbrit]

There are two kinds of RAID, and yes it is designed to provide performance and redundancy - to varying degrees depending on which RAID level you choose.
Hardware RAID uses a hardware controller to handle the array configuration and read/write requests. The controller typically has it's own memory, cache and doesn't use system resources (CPU or memory) to perform it's function. Recovery with hardware RAID is generally simple and seamless.
Software uses the OS to do this, at a cost of some system resources. As desktop OSs only support RAID1 (mirroring with 2 drives) this can be an issue with recovery, if the primary boot drive fails. You have to manually change the boot file(e.g. boot.ini) to boot from the mirrored drive.

To achieve what you're after, you'll need a hardware RAID controller.
I've only ever dealt with RAID on servers so am unfamiliar with the desktop offerings, but a quick search yielded this:
http://www.intel.com/products/server...0-overview.htm $225
http://www.intel.com/products/server...0-overview.htm $500

Both have 8 internal SATA/SAS ports.


Looks like this will provide the capability to have a RAID 5, 10 or 50 array (not sure about a hotspare)

With RAID 5, you'll only get the use of the smallest drive's space - so in your case, you'd only get 1Tb of the 1.5Tb drive in the array.

RAID 5 is striping with parity. Minimum 3 drives.
On each drive in the array, data is striped across the drive with parity information to allow for a RAID rebuild in the event of a single drive failure. The capacity of the RAID5 array is n-1 where n is the total number of drives. e.g. with 6 1Tb drives, you'd have a 5Tb array.

[gschnider]

thanks Orbrit - I might just use software to create image back ups and not deal with RAID at all. Thanks for your help

[orbrit]

The issue I think you're facing is protecting yourself against hundreds of hours of encoding DVDs should the storage array fail.
The problem with backing up TBs of data, is that it takes a long time and you need TBs of storage to back it up!

As far as which video card, I'll let someone else answer that. I just think the 5770 is overkill if you're not planning on playing DirectX11 games.

[glc]

All you need for a HTPC is a 5450, the P7P55D-E Pro is overkill, as is the i7 processor and the 850 watt power supply. If you really want a RAID, you need a hardware RAID card, I prefer Adaptec, and I prefer RAID 5. You will also need a separate boot drive, a RAID array larger than 2tb cannot be made bootable.

[gschnider]

GLC - thanks for the response. I think I'm going to ditch the raid config and just use software to do image file backups - basically I'll create two jbods and use acronis or similar to back up.

I was shopping around using reviews as a guide. I tried to stay away from products that recieved less than steller reviews on Newegg. what MOBO would you suggest - how about

Gigabyte Intel Core i7/i5/LGA1156/4DDR3-2200/CrossFireX/GBE/Raid/SATA3/USB3.0/7.1-CH ATX Motherboard GA-P55A-UD3 - $124 - Amazon

My issue with the video card is that I need to control 3 monitors (one desktop monitor and 2 TV's). The PC is in the office and I want to run an HDMI cable to one TV, a DVI to HDMI to the 2nd TV and then DVI to the desktop monitor. I use 2 extended USB recievers and a combination of Harmony remotes and Gyration mouse/keyboard combos to control. -- so basically I need a video card that can handle that.

[glc]

The P7P55D-E is $50 less and should be all you need. The i5-750 should also be all you need, that will save another $80.