Archive for January, 2009

HD Multimedia Drives

Saturday, January 31st, 2009
I built a HTPC about 5 years ago, and its starting to show its age. It an older Celeron, with about 512MB RAM, and a Haupaunge cap card, running XP Media center and SageTV. It can’t do HD, and it chokes on a lot of XVID and DIVX movies these days. Since then, I’ve got a nice Dish Network HD dual tuner box, so I don’t need TV recording.

This week, Costco sent out a coupon book, and my wife asked about one of these:
http://www.costco.com/Browse/Produc…Prodid=11277556

I’m still weary of Iomega, <CLICK CLICK CLICK, DEAD>.

Any opinions on this item? I’d like it to have DIVX6 support, and a network interface, but for $160, I’m willing to give it a try.

Any other “HD multimedia drives” I should look at?

A maximum resolution of 480p doesn’t seem that great to me. Plus, like you said, Iomega doesn’t have the best reputation in the world.

One option might be to upgrade the HTPC. It shouldn’t be very expensive, especially reusing components. This Gigabyte 780G mobo, one of AMD’s new low-power Athlon X2s, and a couple gigs of RAM comes out to just over $200. Reuse your hard drive, case, peripherals, OS license, and such, and you’ve got a system with a new lease on life. It should have enough power for most XVID-type stuff, and the onboard video has decoding acceleration for H264.

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