Propellerhead Gear: HTPC Upgrade

The home theater PC (HTPC) in my main A/V system is built in an Ahanix D-Vine case. Originally, it had some pretty pedestrian parts in it although the bones were good. Over time though, it got the Intel E8400 "Wolfdale" CPU processor from the original Blackbird, along with 8Gb of RAM, and it was decently powerful for what it was asked to do. Much like Japanese car manufacturers, I like to do a mid-generation facelift before any major rebuild. And as the small HTPC is already on "2nd Gen Core" platform and now the main workstation is on an "Ivy Bridge" i5, changes need to be made to this old girl. 

Originally, my only idea was to upgrade it's small 64Gb Mushkin Callista SSD to something bigger. It was going to be part of the "cascade", taking the 128Gb Samsung from the interim workstation build, but I came upon this 120Gb, OCZ Vertex 2 a few weeks ago. And since this SSD was an odd 3.5", vs. the normal 2.5", it couldn't ever go into a notebook, so into the HTPC it went. 

The other change ended up being this: a 500Gb/7200rpm Hitachi 5K drive which replaced the 500Gb/7200rpm, Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 that was in there. You might be asking yourself, why did he do that? Well, other than my long-running bias against Seagate drives, that particular Seagate is PATA. And with my FreeNAS box having a Promise dual IDE controller and only 3 drives to fill it out.....I needed/wanted a fourth PATA drive to fill it out. So I picked up a used 500Gb SATA drive to go into the HTPC and moved it's old drive.

And of course, with the new drives, comes a new load for Window. As much of a pain in the behind that it is, there's nothing like a fresh Windows load to make a machine run fast. Although this little side-trek didn't take any parts from the Blackbird rebuild directly, it was effected by it peripherally. What happened to the old 64Gb Mushkin SSD? It went into a client machine and therefore fulfilled a purpose as well as defrayed the cost of the upgrade. I charged the buyer $50 to upgrade to the SSD from a mechanical drive, and the 120Gb OCZ SSD cost me $60. So I guess upgrade that doubled the size of my boot drive costs me $10 and some time to reload the OS.

Anything else come out of this little upgrade? Well.....now that you mention it..... While I was researching, I came across this Thermaltake DH-202 HTPC case. I've always found the D-Vine a little lacking in front-panel access and info, and this case has not only lots of controls, but also a 7" display so if I'm just doing something; say doing Windows updates, I can do it right from the machine vs. having to turn on the whole rig. Or if I'm just trying to stream some music from the server. Just sayin'.......