Ultimate HTPC/Media Server build - part 1 purchased, need storage format advice. - Page 2

As long as it works, I'll be happy.

toys arrived. pics in the OP.

Also, need some help finding a micro-sata power cable or adapter. The adapter I ordered comes with micro sata for both ports, but my slim DVD drive takes a normal sata data cable - I just need the power cable adapted. Struck out at tigerdirect and newegg both.
Edited by goros - 3/4/13 at 7:14pm

I saw that one. The close up pics don't seem to match what is on the back of the slim dvd drive. The slim DVD has a standard sata for data, and the one at newegg seems to be some shrunken modified thing. I was hoping someone offered a pigtail that just turns a standard mini-4 or standard 4 (or even standard sata) to micro sata power. No reason to adapt the data line as it should be a clean passthru.

I have a pair of external drive bays that will be getting a BDXL burner and a DVD burner respectively, so I can use those until the slim DVD gets power I suppose.

ETA - it's not MICRO SATA - it's SLIMLINE SATA for dvd drives.

http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10226&cs_id=1022605&p_id=7639&seq=1&format=1#largeimage

good old monoprice.
Edited by goros - 3/5/13 at 5:56am

Yep I ordered that one along with all my cat6 patch cables since I am moving all the networking stuff to the basement with the server and the receiver as part of the "make the wife happy and hide the gizmo's" project.

This has the correct ends, the one from Tigerdirect and Newegg don't look like they will fit the slim DVD, just the 1.8" hard drives using Micro SATA. Apparently the slim dvd I bought uses Slimline SATA. WTF ever happened to standardizing stuff?

On the bright side my GPU and CPU fan will be here today and my HDD's and breakout cables tomorrow.

Yeah I couldn't find any that connected for MicroSata or SlimlineSATA that didn't have both devices mounted together on the end that connects to the actual device.

Lame, but I'll deal.

System up and running, pics updated.

What am I missing

I have win 7 x64 ultimate installed and running, winTV for the hauppauge, latest LSI drivers for the m1015, Plex, metabrowser, mediabrowser, FlexRAID, Handbrake, MakeMKV & MKVMerge GUI...

I'm comtemplating sticking tunebite, dbpoweramp, and dvdfab on as well.

Any suggestions? 25TB of space up and functional.
Edited by goros - 3/9/13 at 6:23am

I got shark007's codecs, do I need mediacentermaster if I'm already using MetaBrowser?
I looked at mpc-hc but I want to see how WMC does before I start altering. With the amount of CPU and memory in this beast I shouldn't need to deal with issues, but we shall see.

0.o

Once I get it all set up and get some media ripped (300+ DVD's plus 65 or so Bluray's) I'll probably want to experiment. Been thinking about bringing the RAM to 1600, tightening the timings and OC'ing the CPU to ~4.5GHz. My issue will be keeping the c-states and virtualization enabled since I usually 24/7 OC at full clocks and volts, but for the 3930k I'd like to extend the life as much as I can... Stability issues from voltage changes concern me and I don't like offset overclocking on principle, but I'll deal.

For the record I run 24hrs of memtest86+ 4.20, 24hrs of prime95 x64 with 95% memory use, 8hrs of OCCT Linpack 90% mem avx enabled, 3dmark, 3dmark 11, and 3dmark vantage, pcmark vantage and pcmark 7 with a few others (ungine, aida64, sisoftsandra etc) to guarantee 100% stability before doing anything that could compromise data.

Do you think MPC-HC with this setup would still function as part of WMC without a mess of screwing around? I'm using a Harmony 900 so I want it as simple as possible.
Edited by goros - 3/10/13 at 2:53pm

Oh, and holy crap. My 8 HDD's that are connected to the M1015 (5 @ 2TB and 3 @ 3TB) formatted in under HALF the time the two 3TB drives connected to the x79 (not the Marvell) 6Gb/s native ports. The 2TB drives finished formatting about 30 minutes before the 3TB drives....and the other 2 off the mobo are taking almost 12 hours (I did a full format, not a quick).

Holy bejeebus.

I activated all 10 drives as GPT and did a full format @ 64k clusters via disk management. It took about 6 hours on the drives connected to the M1015, and took over 12 hours for the 2 connected directly to the motherboard. Crazy that both 6g systems were so different, I wonder what the 6g Marvell controller would have done? I used identical settings for all of them, and verified again that the mobo ports I plugged into were the x79 native 6g ports.

The extra bandwidth of having 40pcie lanes to the processor is the only thing I can think of that would have caused the card to operate so much faster than the motherboard native connections. All drives show 6g and correct attributes, so it's not a bad connection.


I'm a bios overclocker by nature. I got it stable at an offset of +.020 @ 4.3GHz for a full load voltage of 1.32v and max temp of 74c. I took manual control of all the voltages on the board because some people reported asus likes to pump vccsa and vtt pll up over 1.2v on auto which will kill a c2 stepping 3930k in hours.

I was also able to tighten the memory from 11-11-11-30 3t @ 1.5v 2133MHz to 9-9-9-24 1t @ 1.5v 1600MHz. Significant boost there for SB-e.

So at idle I run at around 1.2GHz at .88v and under max load and heat I hit 4.3GHz @ 1.324v. I couldn't get stable over 4.3 without adding more than 1.35v so I stopped there to cut on heat and power use. All c states and whatnot still enabled so I don't burn juice.

I also installed syncbackpro to back up data from the other pc's in the house to the server, and Hard Disk Sentinel pro so I could get real time SMART monitoring of all the drives connected to the M1015. Diskeeper12 Pro is running my defrag and drive optimization functions.

I did kill virtualization, but I should be able to turn it back on I anything I install from here out needs it.
Edited by goros - 3/11/13 at 12:17pm

AHA! excellent.

Thanks for that tip. ETA - my drives are not listed as folders but actual drives, and I have no idea how to do this. HELP!!

I use diskeeper pro on all my pc's since they all have ssd's - been using it for years and it's good to go with 0 complications (it actually helps ensure your ssd's are set up in win7 correctly). The other 2 apps were recommended for the purpose and seem to be plug and play and have some really neat tools with them that should be helpful as I install and populate an external norco 4224 for more space.

All my files are already backed up for all my other pc's (2 laptops and 2 pc's) and it will run the backup weekly until I tell it to stop.

Flexraid is up with 2 parity drives, so I have just a tad over 17gb total space available - we'll see how it looks once the lossless music and all the movies/tv series are ripped.

This should be fun - it took 3 days to rip my CD collection last time I did it (and this is the reason I'm backing up now)

Can't wait to see how long the dvd's will take.
Edited by goros - 3/11/13 at 3:53pm

Yeah...I have no idea where to access that in flexraid. I was hoping it was just me.

Thanks, I knew where to access it in windows, just no clue what to look for in flexraid. Now I just need to figure out the Greek that I have to type in to map the paths to the drives on the cards (drives 4-11).

I used cruise control, pulled the drive mappings from the command prompt and entered them, no dice. I'm sure I did something wrong, but I'm not really sweating it, I hdsetinel does everything for me anyway.