How much to build a HTPC?

[SkyBolt]

I wonder if one of those would work as a tv input for Sage/MCE/etc.

You would need a BDA driver.

 

[Mike]

A have had 2 motherboards die on me and have seen others. The both had raid controllers on board. In the end I just stopped using raid all together, but I would definatley use a separate controller.

My apologies on this, I wasn't thinking when this thread was going on (also could have been tied to child related sleep deprivation). I was thinking Raid 0/1. For RAID 5 it would definitely make more sense for an external card just for performance reasons (parity calculation, performance, etc).

For my media server I did not elect to use RAID 5 at this time as I use it as a speed rack, and I have the originals. My plan is to link in a changer in addition to a growing hard drive farm.

And yes Raid 0 is not recommended since it doubles the chance of failure (for what many believe is a negligible gain).