Thread: Peripherals and Software

You'll need tons of hard-drive space to store your media, as well as an HD optical drive to play high-def movies.

Hard drive: Compressed HD video recordings can eat up roughly 7GB per hour, so get a hard drive big enough to hold those recordings. Nearly all current mother¬boards support the SATA bus, and the latest models run at 3GB per second¬though units that operate at 1GB per second should be fast enough for this system. Pick a drive that spins at 7200 rpm or greater.



While you could install multiple drives for optimum performance, a big, single drive will be sufficient. Go for at least 500GB. I settled on a 1 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 because of its speed and its capacity to hold 140 high-def episodes of Losl. If you add multiple drives, po¬sition them as far as possible from each other, so won't get too hot.