[mythtv-users] Advice on Building a Quiet MythTV Box?

[migmog]

2008/11/26 Brian Wood <beww at beww.org>:
> CF devices are getting large in terms of capacity.
>
> I saw a 60 tera-byte CF advertised. I would have bought it, but I didn't have
> a spare $32,000.00 on hand.
>

Ha ha ha!

I did a CF frontend a couple of years ago, but decided to go for
netbooting instead as I wanted to use the CF card to replace the hard
drive in my laptop instead..  My 'silent' system consisted of a P3-600
w/256MB RAM back end, maybe a bit overpowered, but hey it was only £20
on ebay ;-)  You guys with your quad core 4gb backends are wasting
your money....... In addition, I have a Maxtor Shared Storage network
hard drive for storage and net-booting duty (plus music and picture
server duty, and a bunch of other tasks). This box is always on and
consumes about 7 watts. It wakes the backend box on demand. Both of
these boxes live in a cupboard. The frontend was a net-booted VIA
mini-itx frontend running minimyth. Booted in about a minute, but more
importantly resumed from standby in under 10 seconds and consumed VERY
little power - ~35 watts when showing video, ~3 watts in standby -
which is too high but still an order of magnitude better that what
most people get.

This all worked very nicely EXCEPT FOR LIVE TV which SUCKED so badly
it was unusable. One day the frontend died, so I replaced it with a
Topfield commercial PVR which works very well for live TV, but is
thoroughly amateur compared to myth for recordings. The back end is
still chuntering away recording stuff which I can transfer to the
commercial PVR to watch if I want to.

You really want to split your system into front and backends in order
to get silence where you want it, and power where it doesn't matter.