George Ou - Technology for mortals

Build the ultimate 5-TB Home Theater gaming PC that rips or burns 6 DVDs simultaneously

May 20

Written by: George Ou
5/20/2008 1:40 AM

My former colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes pondered whether it was feasible to rip (to digitally archive) his entire DVD collection in to a computer. Adrian estimates that he has at least 600 DVDs and that each would take 30 minutes to rip which works out to 12.5 days of non-stop ripping. So I popped Adrian an instant message telling him that it's actually nowhere near as bad and that it could be done 6 DVDs at a time and each batch would probably take no more than 15 minutes which works out to 25 hours of solid ripping time. After chatting for about an hour, I think Adrian was fairly convinced that this was more than feasible and that perhaps he would even attempt it.

But how would you actually build such a machine? A key consideration is that you never want to use PATA interface optical drives configured as master/slave because of severe performance problems for ripping or burning DVDs. The other problem is that it's difficult to hook up 6 PATA drives is the difficulty in wiring those thick or wide PATA cables and motherboards don't come with 6 PATA ports. But this is an easy problem to solve because many of the newer Intel P35-chipset motherboards have 8 SATA II ports which allows you to easily connect many hard drives and optical drives.

Adrian and I pondered some hardware options and Adrian suggested the "Sharkoon Rebel 12" full ATX tower chassis he sourced from the UK, the ICY DOCK MB455SPF-B 5 in 3 Multi Bay, and an Adaptec 1430SA 4-port SATA II RAID controller. I found the Sabrent SBT-SRD4 PCI 4-port SATA I controller for $60 and since SATA I is probably 10 times faster than what you need for an optical drive and we don't need RAID, I suggested the cheaper option.

I also suggested that this DVD ripping station would be an awesome storage NAS (Network Attached Storage) box as well as an awesome HTPC (Home Theater PC) and gaming system all at the same time. This not only saves you money because you don't need to build multiple solutions, but it saves on energy costs since this is a low-power machine. It also has the ability to burn 5 or 6 DVDs at a time which allows you to quickly make multiple copies of your kids school recital to hand out or hold on as backups.

I have put together two build lists. The first is a 5-drive ripping/burning station with 3.75 TB of storage that also serves as an HTPC computer. The second is the ultimate 5 TB NAS, HTPC, Gaming, Ripping/Burning PC that can be built at an affordable price. Given the fact that the average DVD requires about 6 GBs of storage, the first configuration will store 625 DVDs and the second will store 833 DVDs. The 5 TB solution can also store around 8000 CDs uncompressed. If you want to record TV programming at 5 Mbps, the 5 TB system will let you store 2,222 hours of programming. If you want to record over-the-air HD programming at 15 Mbps, the 5 TB system will let you store 740 hours of programming.

Note: You are free to mix and match or substitute your own preferences in hardware but if you're not sure about something, stick with the exact build list.

Configuration I - 3.75 TB NAS, 5x Rip/Burn, HTPC

Component	Price
GIGABYTE GA-EP35-DS3R LGA 775 Intel P35 ICH9R (8-SATA ports)	128
Intel Pentium E2180 Allendale 2GHz dual-core	70
2 GB DDR2-800 DIMM	43
SeaSonic S12 II SS-330GB ATX12V 330W "80 Plus" Power Supply	68
COOLER MASTER COSMOS 1000 RC-1000-KSN1-GP Black/Silver	225
Leadtek PX8500 GT TDH HDMI GeForce 8500GT 256MB	88
(Quantity 6) Western Digital Caviar GP WD7500AACS 750GB - OEM	720
(Quantity 5) LG Black 20X DVD burner (SATA)	160
Sabrent SBT-SRD4 PCI 4-port SATA I	34
Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1250 MC - White Box 1187 PCI-Express	66
Sub total (including shipping)	1602

Configuration II - 5 TB NAS, 6x Rip/Burn, HTPC, Gaming PC

Component	Price
GIGABYTE GA-EP35-DS3R LGA 775 Intel P35 ICH9R (8-SATA ports)	128
Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 Wolfdale (45nm) 2.53GHz 3MB L2 cache	132
2 GB DDR2-800 DIMM	43
SeaSonic S12 II SS-330GB ATX12V 330W "80 Plus" Power Supply	68
COOLER MASTER Stacker 830 Evolution RC-830-KKN3-GP Black	260
ICY DOCK MB455SPF-B 5 in 3 Multi Bay hot-swap backplane	93
PALiT NE/960TSX0252 GeForce 9600GT SONIC 512MB	177
(Quantity 6) Western Digital Caviar GP WD10EACS 1TB	1116
(Quantity 6) LG Black 20X DVD burner (SATA)	192
Sabrent SBT-SRD4 PCI 4-port SATA I	34
Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1250 MC - White Box 1187 PCI-Express	66
Sub total (including shipping)	2309

Notes on the hardware

The motherboard comes with an ICH9R RAID controller but that's only for 6 of the SATA II ports. The other 2 SATA ports use a separate IDE controller on the motherboard. The extra 4-port Sabrent PCI adapter gives you a total of 16 SATA ports.
The 2 GHz Intel Allendale is overkill for the storage and HTPC application so it's plenty fast and it's a very low power chip on idle and peak power consumption. The faster Intel "Wolfdale" E7200 is even lower power despite its faster performance. You can expect both systems to idle 100 watt range. Both of these CPUs have plenty of room to overclock and a safe overclock can be achieved by simply adjusting the FSB clock speed from 266 to 333. But be sure you don't allow the effective memory clock to go above 400 MHz since the Gigabyte motherboards like to adjust the memory ratios.
2 GB DDR2-800 DIMM memory is pretty standard on any computer these days because of the low cost and it gives you room to overclock. You could get 2 of them just to get dual-channel memory.
The quality SeaSonic 330 watt power supply is more than enough for both systems. These CPUs are extremely low power and even the Western Digital hard drives are "green" and they only consume half the power of ordinary hard drives . The NVIDIA 9600 Graphics card is probably the lowest power consuming video card capable of adequate game play. So there is absolutely nothing in this computer that will overload the power supply and there's not much more you can add to the system as it's already physically filled to capacity. If you're planning on using an Intel Quad-core CPU or a much more powerful GPU, it will still be adequate but you could switch to the 400 watt power supply if you want extra room to grow.
The NVIDIA 8500 is fine for HTPC but it isn't a gaming card. The NVIDIA 9600 Graphics card is not only low power but it can run games adequately fast for 1680x1050 or even 1920x1080. This PALiT card even has a "Displayport" port which allows ultra high resolution displays but I selected it because of the HDMI port. The Leadtek 8500 also has an HDMI port so check out my old HDMI survival guide . Note that the sound works by you running an S/PDIF digital audio cable from your motherboard to the video card. The video card then consolidates that audio signal in to the HDMI port so you only need a single HDMI cable going from your video card to the HDTV.
The Hauppauge WinTV card is both an ATSC digital SD/HD TV tuner and an analog cable TV tuner adapter for maximum versatility.

RAID configuration tips

Be sure to only use the non-ICH9R ports (it is color coded on the motherboard) for the optical drives and leave the 6 Intel ICH9R ports for the hard drives. Note that if you want good RAID-5 write performance, you must install the Intel RAID software and enable "write-back cache". The downside to enabling "write-back cache" is that it can lead to data corruption if the power goes out while you're writing. That's not a big problem for this application since you would simply delete the unfinished DVD ripping batch jobs and start them over again.

Disk ripping tips

To rip 6 DVDs at the same time, simply fire up 6 copies of " DVD Decrypter ". Since DVD Decrypter was discontinued in 2005 in response to a legal threat, it may not work on some of the latest DVD titles. I would suggest putting those in a separate but small pile and use a commercial DVD ripper or look at the DVD backup guides on Doom9.org . My friend Charles recommends using the AnyDVD commercial middleware that makes DVD Decrypter work for any DVD and that it's worth the 40 Euros.

Is DVD Ripping legal? According to Wikipedia entry on DVD Decrypter

"In the noted "321" case, Federal District Judge Susan Illston, of the Northern District of California [6], ruled that the backup copies made with software such as DVD Decrypter are in fact legal but that distribution of the software used to make them is illegal . As of the date of this revision, neither the US Supreme Court nor the US Congress has taken definitive action on the matter."

So it appears that it's legal to use but illegal to distribute but it's far from settled. If you're not giving away or selling copyrighted movies and you're only ripping DVDs that you purchased for personal use, it's doubtful that you will run afoul of the law.

Lastly, this hardware does support the ripping of CDs. Since CDs are so small to begin with, I would suggest that you rip your CDs to a lossless format rather than compressing it further for maximum quality. You can always convert them later to MP3 or WMA format for your portable players.

Disk burning tips

Burning 6 different images at the same time may not be wise and may result in ruined blanks. You can try it but I generally recommend synchronized burning of identical images (make multiple copies of same disk simultaneously). The software I use is Nero Burning ROM which supports multiple targets and it works for both DVDs as well as CDs.

Operating System

If you want the flexibility of a Windows Media Center machine that can game along with the storage capability, then Windows Vista Premium Edition $95 is probably your best bet. Microsoft's Windows Home Server costs $160 and you can't use it as a Windows Media Center and you can't even get Video Drivers. If you have an older copy of Windows Media Center Edition (same as Windows XP), that should work too. Sure you won't get the advanced storage features but it's not worth the tradeoff to me and you can still share out directories with Windows Vista Premium. Yes I'm cheap because computer hardware doesn't grow on trees and I want a system that does a whole lot more than just storage. It also takes a lot more power to run two computers since both the storage server and the media center PC needs to be turned on all the time and it makes perfect sense to consolidate the two.

If you have any other questions, please post a question below.

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16 comments so far...

I will save you $120 on the drives

Well, most of that

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0266876

I was going to buy the same drives, how ever, I felt the need to wait on the cost due to the fact that I need to purchase some other items first.

By nuCrash on 5/20/2008 3:54 AM

Thanks for the link nuCrash, will update

nt

By host on 5/20/2008 4:06 AM

Re: Build the ultimate 5-TB Home Theater gaming PC that rips or burns 6 DVDs simultaneously

This is quite timely, thanks! I was looking to replace the CPU on my server, I think this one fits the bill perfectly, at a price I love!

J.Ja

By jmjames on 5/20/2008 9:57 AM

Re: Build the ultimate 5-TB Home Theater gaming PC that rips or burns 6 DVDs simultaneously

Why not do an AMD Config?

By Randall Lind on 5/20/2008 11:59 AM

PATA

I'd like to reiterate your point about PATA: about a year ago I decided to copy back all my archived movies from stacks of burned CDs, so I hooked up a second CD drive to my computer on the same ribbon as my first CD drive. However, I soon realized that this approach took exactly TWICE as long as reading from 1 drive.

Needless to say, I got frustrated, and learned a thing or two about PATA. Also, this was before the very recent times of SATA optical drives, so there really wasn't any other options for me other than doing it 1 CD at a time.

By Bagha on 5/20/2008 11:59 AM

I didn't do AMD because they didn't meet the requirements

AMD's 780 chipset has no RAID-5 support. The Intel P35 ICH9R chipset is one of the best integrated RAID solutions on the market. See the performance numbers here http://blogs.zdnet.com/Ou/?p=484 for the ICH8R. The ICH9R is even better than the ICH8R.

AMD CPUs lack SSE4.1 instruction set which is necessary for fast video encoding. AMD's desktop and mainstream server performance is lagging. Although one can argue that the CPUs offer a good value for the money, AMD quad-core CPUs consume more power in IDLE than Intel quad-core CPU consume at PEAK power. For a machine that will be left on 24x7, energy efficiency becomes even more important.

AMD memory architecture is faster but that comes in to play for multi-socket or High Performance Computing applications. Neither of these advantages come in to play in this application.

Based on this assessment, AMD was not selected for this project.

George Ou

By host on 5/20/2008 12:07 PM

Justin, make sure your motherboard supports newer CPUs

945 chipset motherboards may not (probably won't) support Intel 45nm CPUs because it's too old of a chipset.

If you're talking about the $70 Allendale dual-core CPU, that should work on a 945 chipset motherboard provided the BIOS is reasonably up to date.

George Ou

By host on 5/20/2008 12:20 PM

Bagha, I have used multiple PATA drives before, but only using a dedicated PATA port per optical drive.

Bagha, I have used multiple PATA drives before, but only using a dedicated PATA port per optical drive. The problem here is that motherboards only have 2 PATA ports most of the time. You might be able to get 4 PATA ports on some older motherboards or you can add a PATA PCI controller. The problem is that the cabling for PATA is much harder than SATA cables. While you might have to pay a $5 premium on SATA optical drives, it's well worth it.

George Ou

By host on 5/20/2008 12:23 PM

Re: Build the ultimate 5-TB Home Theater gaming PC that rips or burns 6 DVDs simultaneously

Hey George,

How did you get all the stuff in the 5 TB system to work on a 330W power supply? Even at 80-plus, I would expect to need at least 500 or 600W for a beast like that.

Also, in looking around for ICH9R reviews, I've seen some accounts of people whose RAID arrays have suddenly stopped working or disappeared, and they had to jump through all sorts of hoops to get them working again. Have you experienced any issues with the ICH9R chipset?

Great article, though. :)

By Chris on 5/22/2008 10:56 AM

I'll do the exact calculations for you.

The load for the system without the hard drives would be around 140W peak output which translates to 175W peak input power (power you measure at plug). When you add the hard drives at peak power of 9W per drive (measured input power), that is an additional 54W for all 6 drives added to the 175W number which is 229W. 229W is 183.2W output power to the system components. You've got an extra 147W safety margin to work with even when it's worst case with your CPU, GPU, and hard drives are all cranking full power at the same time. The reality is that you'll never be cranking the hard drives when you game which means realistically you're looking at 202W peak input power while gaming and the power supply will do over 400W input.

The 330W peak output PSU would have a peak input of 412W since it's an 80% efficient PSU.

I've tested this type of system on a single hard drive on the Sparkle SPI220LE 1U 220W PSU and even that is well within safety margins. But once you do the worst-case measurements and do the math, you realize how silly a 500W PSU is. Not only are you wasting money but you're wasting power because your PSU is too big to handle an 80W load efficiently.

By host on 5/22/2008 11:09 AM

Re: PSU requirements (To Chris)

Chris, PSUs are rated by their output, not their input. What's more, quality PSU ratings are for continuous output, not peak.

The single biggest draw in a PC is the GPU, and even those aren't that high if you're not playing a game.

That Seasonic is plenty of power.

The reality is that 99.999% of the time when someone says that a person needs 500+ watt PSU for a system, that person could get buy with far less. Any modern quality brand PSU of that class can handle 8800GT SLI with plenty of headroom.

I've got a e4300, 2HDs, 8800GT and I don't think I've ever seen it top 200W pulled form the wall. I believe my PSU's efficiency rating is roughly 75%.

The key is whether or not you buy a quality PSU. At some point, we went from saying you need an outrageously high wattage PSU if you buy a POS one (because they're always over rated) to you need that much for a high quality PSU. I sometimes think the people who say this stuff work for the PSU companies (or own substantial stock in them).

By KC on 5/22/2008 4:19 PM

Re: Build the ultimate 5-TB Home Theater gaming PC that rips or burns 6 DVDs simultaneously

Mr George Ou-Slightly off topic-- Raid setups--: Can the 8 sata ports on the be configued on the GA-EP35-DS3R for a small,low cost, SBS 2003 premium server in the following order with the OS installed 1 st as a raid 1 on the 2 sata II ports as the "C" drive and then successively, 3 channels of raid 1 in successive pairs on the ICH9r controller to get some redundancy and increased I/O to MSSQL database for the "D" drive. I realize this doesn't protect if a hardware failure (mother board/power supply) leads to an interupption during a write cycle and the subsequent database corruption but battery backuped sata multichannel raid controllers are quite a bit more expensive. I am using a dual redundant power supply (for cleaner power and added reliability--leaving the MB as the only single point nonredundant part for failure and I think equal to the failure rate of the expensive raid controller). Sorry for off topic but couldn't seem to find anything on web searches to address this and you're a strong proponent for the use of the firmware raid of the ICH(*)R controllers and multiple channels of raid 1 over raid 5/10 systems for small systems. Chuck Menz

By Charles Menz on 5/26/2008 2:33 PM

Re: Build the ultimate 5-TB Home Theater gaming PC that rips or burns 6 DVDs simultaneously

George, this may be a duplicate post and somewhat off track but after much searching on the internet I couldn't be completely sure about a small, inexpensive MSSQL server. I wanted to know your/the blogs comments if the GA-EP35-DS3R mother board could run the following raid drive setup for a SBS 2003 R2 premium server runing the 32 bit version of SBS. The SATA2 controller (the 2 - purple sata ports) set up first as 2 channels of raid1 for the 2003 server os and swap files as the "C" drive and then use the 6 yellow ports of the ICH9R for 3 successive pairs of raid 1 to form 3 channnels of disks for the MSSQL 2005 database to form the "D" drive with write back caching enabled . Files/OS/programs that need to be loaded would be by rare/initiail use of a USB CD/DVD rom and the power supply is a I-Star 400 watt dual redundant hot swap power supply with an added additional intel pro gigabit lan card.
I know that if there is a failure in the system, that the data base would become corrupted. However, the only single point of failure is the mother board itself with everything else redundant including an external UPS, but thought that going to an expensive battery backed up sata raid card wouldn't give me that much additional protection for this inexpensive system ( ie the sata raid card has almost as much chance of failing as the MB) FOR preventing database corruption in case of a hardware/power failure. The server is incrermentally backed up every 4 hours and if 4 hours of data is corrupted it can be corrected by just re-adding the workstations data to the incremental backups during a recovery in a system that is used approximately 14 hrs/day. Can all of the ICH9R ports be configured at once for the 2nd "D" drive or should they be done in pairs? Any comments, positive or negative are appreciated. Chuck Menz

By clmenz on 5/26/2008 12:51 PM

Charles, the ICH9R controls 6 of those SATA ports, 2 are 3rd party controllers

You can configure RAID using Windows 2003 drivers for the ICH9R so yes, you should be able to use it in Windows Home Server. You can configure any combination of RAID you like. And yes, it does not have battery backup so enabling write back cache can cause data corruption if the power goes out during the write job. This is probably not ideal for a production server so I would spend the money on a RAID controller with battery backup.

By host on 5/26/2008 2:37 PM

Re: Build the ultimate 5-TB Home Theater gaming PC that rips or burns 6 DVDs simultaneously

George are the battery backed up raid controllers that that much more reliable then the combo of a good ups into dual redundant hot swap power supplies into the motherboard then raid controller itself? Not to belabor the point/post but it seems to me that it is then a question of the reliabliity of the motherboard vs. the reliability of the battery backuped raid controlller--- as everythig else is duplicated and or can be shut down prior to corrupting a database on a write cycle.

By clmenz on 5/31/2008 8:37 AM

It doesn't matter if the power supply and motherboard shut down, the RAID controller will hold the data

It doesn't matter if the power supply and motherboard shut down, the RAID controller will hold the data in its memory using the battery backup. When the power gets restored, it will complete whatever write job it was attempting before the power got cut.

By host on 5/31/2008 4:22 PM

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