SPCR

Hey all -

I want to replace my CoolerMaster case with a horizontal style media center type case for placement purposes in my office/music studio. Any recommendations? I haven't seen many (if any) reviewed on SPCR and am most certainly interested in a quiet case. I can't do a small form factor PC since I use 3 hard drives, and have 3 optical drives.

Thanks ahead of time for any and all advice!

AP

3 optical drives?

Cripes.

Have a look at some of the Silverstone cases. Some of these support 2 optical drives and one or two may even support 3.

Cripes? 8^)

Well... CDR.... DVD player... DVD-R so I can rip from DVD to DVDR... don't most geeks use 3 drives?

AP

Why don't you have one player and one writer? Many geeks may have 3 or more optical drives but they probably do not use or need them.

Anyway, I second the Silverstone recommendation, more specifically the LC-17. Its got six hard drive bays and excellent cooling potential compared to most HTPC cases.

acpryor wrote:don't most geeks use 3 drives?

No. At least not the geeks around here.

Most geeks I know use ONE optical drive. No sense in cramming an optical drive into an even more stuffy situation than normal!

It's Joe Average pre-builts which ship with multiple optical drives for dubious "reasons" (yeah, you need it so you can copy a CD!).

For a media center PC there is no need at all for three drives, the need for two is tenuos at most. A good DVD RW can do everything you need to do. If you're a true DVD/CD geek then you'd have ditched the CDR by now at least.

If you're not going to be burning on the fly there's no need for dual opticals in a media center PC.

I'm about as geeky as they come computer-wise, and although I have 3 optical drives, they're all in different computers.

It's generally been my experience that you don't need more than 2 optical drives, and very often, you don't even need 2. With 2 drives, you can do a straight drive-to-drive copy. However, in the past, even with relatively fast hardware, it caused problems. 2nd advantage of 2 optical drives is that you can pipeline the copying of multiple discs, but if you're not copying CDs all the time, do you REALLY need 2 drives. These days, I just have one DVD burner per computer and it handles all my needs. And to be perfectly honest, they're not all that terribly expensive these days, at least in this country.

Cooler Master cases are typically thin aluminum, and with 3 hard drives, you're pretty well f***ed for noise, what with idle and seek vibrations.

If you can reduce the overall number of drive you want to use, you stand a better chance at noise. Remember, it's not really the case that's noisy so much as what you put into it and how.

Not sure about the need for 3 hard drives - I prefer to keep the hard drive space on the server (living in a separate room), and hook the media PC to the server using gigabit Ethernet (trust me, that's plenty fast enough!) - gigabit Ethernet costs nothing but the cost of the switch, because all the motherboards come with it. And the switches are dirt cheap now, especially if you only need 5 or 8 ports.

The media PC needs enough hard disk to boot (I'm not booting over Ethernet - yet!) and that's all. Keeping all the storage on the server also means that you can have multiple media PCs in different rooms, all working from the same server.

The subject line was exactly what I was looking for. How did this turn into an optical drive discussion? Any recommendations for a HTPC case using a reasonable number of drives (one )?

Ahem:

Mariner wrote:Have a look at some of the Silverstone cases.