House Cleaning

So I've been cleaning house, removing some links and adding some new ones.

For those in the know, I've abandoned xvid encoding completely.  x264 is the only way to encode those pesky DVD's into something watchable on your tv.  Better quality, smaller size, pure awesomeness.  So i removed AutoGK and now fully endorse AutoMKV for encoding.  I have just completed encoding all our DVD's at home and they take up 1/2 to 1/3 of the space required by full DVD rips and the quality is virtually the same.  So instead of taking up 2 500g hardives, i now have all my movies on 1 500g with room to spare... which I'll need for HD content soon to come.

My current server is running the following:

AMD Athlon x2 BE2400 2.3Ghz

4G DDR2-800

1- 250G Seagate IDE Hard Drive

3- 500G Seagate SATA Hard Drive

I have room on the Motherboard for one more SATA... then I'm at a crossroads if I want to RAID it up, there by losing 500G for storage but get increased performance, reliability, and convenience (one big 1.5T Drive), or just have 4- 500G hard drives and cry when one dies and i lose a lot of data.  I really should just wait and get 4- 1T drives but, since 500G Seagates are right around $70 and set to drop again... I may just get it, make the RAID, enjoy it for a while and save my pennies for 4- 1T drives.

I also just completed a small project.  I wanted to put together a system to leave at my parents house that would hold a bunch of kids movies and videos.  I decided on using existing parts and in doing so planned on using one of my home-made boxes.  It was a black case I made out of MDF and for the most part turned out alright.  It was a little rough on the finish and some things never got mounted properly.  So I bought a finish sander (finally) and sanded that puppy down to wood.  Then I bought a can of White Enamel Primer, White Flat Enamel, and a can of Clear coat and around 30 coats later, a proper HD mount, it turned out really well.  The one thing left I have it to properly mount the CD Drive (just held in place with Velcro... yeah)  but everything else looks really good.  I decided on white because of a project I was watching found at HARDOCP.com.  The project turned out really awesome, so since all I had really painted my boxes before were black, I decided on a little change.  It turned out really nice (even elimitating a lot of the seams, thanks to liberal coats of white primer).  Hopefully it can run stable.  I'll post better pics when I get it completely done (cd mount, fan and intake grills).  It has inspired me to do another one... pretty much a longer yet shorter (around 4 1/2" tall compared to around 6 1/2 on this one).  I have plans all drawn up and maybe I'll post them later.

 

Here's to better posts.

Late