L337 HW SKILLZ
I gave the Media Center box a much-needed space upgrade last night. I added a second 120GB drive to it.
The drive I had in was 80Gb, of which only about 60 was free for video, so I've basically tripled my effective space. Ahh...
However, to give you an idea how long it's been since I fiddled with PC componentry, I grabbed the drive out of the box, looked for the IDE connector and said "WTF?". Oh yea, this must be that serial ATA interface. Cool. So I mount the drive in the bay (which I made room in by pulling the mega-obsolete 3.5" floppy drive) and plug in the cable. Oh yeah, power. WTF? Never seen one of these power connectors.
I found some level of redemption in the fact the box didn't have an extra power connector of the 'new fangled' type to use with the drive, so I pulled a cable from another machine and spliced the connector to the MC box's power supply.
I am rusty, but L337. I wasn't doing this nekkid, however.
4 comments:
Kim,
I am amazed that MCE lets you build a system with such a small disk. Even 120GB is not enough to hold tons'o'video.
I have fallen upon using Ximeta disk enclosures and my own disks...they seem to work really well, and you can create virtual network striped disk arrays to increase storage... of course, if you don't need the space...
One other thing, you should be thankful that SATA drives use the same power (ie voltage) as the older drives... otherwise, the results could have been interesting.
Hey John,
A) I'm not sure I need that much space, but a disk array has occurred to me. Still, this is roughly 60-70 hrs worth of stuff, which is plenty. The way I see it, if you aren't going to watch it in the near future, delete.
On the voltage, I tapped into the existing SATA line, so technically, the risk I was taking was whether the power supply could handle up to 2x the current draw on that line.
Kim,
Well, I keep a lot of xmas stuff online.. sure it is used once a year, but I never have to look for "The Grinch" again :-)
Additionally, I have stored all of the Futurama, Scrubs, and various other shows I like.
Connor, on the other hand, loves to have a storehouse of Spongebobs, Avatars and Xiaolin Showdowns....
So we have about 300G worth of RTV recorded shows on my 500G disk, and I am considering getting another 500G to go to a TB.
If you have the space, you can always find a use for it :-)
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