[Pc_Support] MEdia Driven Universal Storage Array (MEDUSA)

[Bryan J. Smith]

I think I've finally decided on what I'm going to do with my old AMD
Athlon MP system when I upgrade.  I'm going to turn it into a
centralized storage device for all media.

One of the reasons I want to reuse the Tyan S2460 (Tiger MP) is because
it has 5V PCI slots.  These are required for the pcHDTV HD-3000, which
is one of the few remaining HDTV cards that don't honor the broadcast
flag.  I'm still going to use my TiVO (possibly upgrading to a TiVO-HD
when I upgrade the TV too), but for local broadcasts, I want to be
unrestricted.
  http://www.pchdtv.com/  

I'm also building a new storage array using the 64-bit PCI NetCell 5000
128MB RAID-"XL" controller.  It will have (5) 160GB 7,200rpm 8MB buffer
HD drives (640GB usable) in it (which I've been picking up for $60-80
after rebate from different places on different weeks).  This will give
it a massive performance capability of virtually (4) RAID-0 drives, not
only for reads, but it's very fast at writes too.  The 5000 is designed
explicitly for (4) 16-bit ATA data paths into the 64-bit PCI approach,
and then the on-board ASIC buffers the SDRAM for writing to the 5th,
dedicated parity disk.  The catch is that you must use the exact
configuration (fixed organization).
  http://www.netcell.com  

I think the combination will make good use of my now 3.5 year old (2
years with the MP2400+ CPUs) Athlon MP system.  It's not the greatest
I/O platform, but I just want a media server, and one that can pick up
ATSC broadcasts for local channels -- no matter where I am.


-- 
Bryan J. Smith                                    b.j.smith at ieee.org 
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Subtotal Cost of Ownership (SCO) for Windows being less than Linux
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) assumes experts for the former, costly
retraining for the latter, omitted "software assurance" costs in 
compatible desktop OS/apps for the former, no free/legacy reuse for
latter, and no basic security, patch or downtime comparison at all.