d_kuhn :
Personally, I would never use HDD space to hold HD movies - aside from the fact that I don't pirate movies it's not very cost effective - you can just about buy the movies legally and spend less. HD burnables are still expensive, and mtbf is going to be much higher with the legal media than you'd ever get with a swap hdd arrangement. You could do better reliability wise with server/raid setups like mine but then you're definitely more expensive than buying the media.
I don't see the logic of owning movies myself. Except for rare exceptions, the idea of seeing a movie a second time is not something I quite understand. But people make movies as a hobby or business whether they be wedding videos, or whatever. And by my experience, MTBF of plastic media is very poor if you are subject that most scary of PC malware called "children". The success of those programs which let you move games to ya hard drive is to a large part fueled by frustrated parents tired of being told they have to pay full price for a media exchange.
d_kuhn :
A single 120mm fan at low speed is sufficient for 5400rpm drives, but not for 4 7.2, 10, or 15k drives... and 5400rpm is insufficient for playing HD content (unless it's in a fast raid setup). Of course hard drives aren't like processors... they won't immediately lock up if you overheat them (unless you REALLY overheat them), but their lifespan will be significantly reduced. On servers with 4 or more drives... I want a LOT of airflow. When I spend $350 bucks a pop on terrabyte drives I don't want them failing from heat fatigue in 2 or 3 years. I've got Intel and Supermicro server cases, both do a great job of keeping the internals cool... both are REALLY loud.
Well one may "want" a lot of airflow, that doesn't mean it's doing one any good in their particular situation. Much of people's PC habits are based upon what they learned "back in the day". A big server handling 100's or 1,000's of I/O's per second is one thing. Some dude watching a movie is another.....3 drives idle, 1 drive pumping. Let's consider for example that the HTPC in question offers no active HD cooling at all. IBM's white paper on the subject shows that a 10 degree increase in temperature cuts HD life by 50%. Before PC cases had mounting for cooling fans, I was putting my HD's in 5-1/4 bays with HD coolers in all the machines I have built going back to 1992, though most of the Hi Performance boxes had 15kSCSI drives.
Your reference to 5400 rpm drives was true years ago but not today. Look at it this way.....if a 120 mm fan is insufficient for 7200 rpm drives why are NAS manufacturers using even smaller ones ? The Infrant NV+ for example has an industry best 5 year warranty on unit and HD's and all it has is a 92mm fan. If a 120mm fan "can't cut it, would you offer a 5 year warranty on $2400 worth of HD's and NAS box with an even smaller 92 mm fan ?
I am sitting next to an Infrant NV+ and the fan is barely running. Check out some NAS reviews and you will often nore reviewers commenting read that HD chattering is louder than the fans. The Buffalo Terrastation, same size....92mm...Yellow machine P410T, smaller , looks like an 80 or a 60.
Until rather recently, I had always used 15k SCSI drives in most high end builds. Those are the kinds of drives a SuperMicro case is designed to hold. Your SM also holds all the other components (MoBo, CPU, chipsets, PSU, etc) which generate tons of heat. That's why it needs huge fans. But look at external drive cases....though very small, the are most often passively cooled. Same thing with NAS units....extremely quiet, using enterprise class drives more often than not and little cooling or noise issues. They use so little power that their PSU's are most often fanless. I did hear the NAS while it was building the RAID volume, my guess partly cause I was specifically listening for it and partially because all the drives are working hard, but haven't noticed it since.
Again, where you will run into problems with any actively cooled device, is when you let ambient temperature climb. As long as your room is 65 - 72 degrees, and you don't have everything stuffed into a small "stereo cabinet with a closed back, you shouldn't hear anything.....especially not sitting 12 feet back watching Star Wars with the subwoofer amp pegging the VU meters.
This seems the ideal solution
http://www.granitedigital.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWCATS&Category=47
But the big thing for me is security / serviceability. If my HTPC goes south, I don't want my library at risk. If a HD in my NAS fails, I yank the drive, I replace it with one of the same size or bigger and I'm done. No restores, no RAID array rebuilding, pop the new drive in and it does the rest itself. When the HTPC goes south or is about to be upgraded.....slide the old out, slide the new in, connect the gigabit cable and done....library remains untouched, unthreatened and me unbothered.
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