[borayeris]

I'm planing to build a SILENT HTPC. Silence is important because it will run in my bedroom. The OS will be Linux.

So my choices are ATOM or ARM CPU's. I really search a lot. I want to put 2 unit of 3 TB of WD green and ARM boards doesn't have SATA port. I found cubieboard which has a SATA port but that's not OK for me because as I said before I will use 2 WD HDD. It means that I have to delete ARM from my list.

I searched a lot Intel ATOM CPU's. D serie is the best. My choices are D525, D2550 and D2700. I found this Zotac ION-ITX T a year ago. It was my dream machine. Nvidia GPU, passive heat sink, Wifi antenas, HDMI, 2 SATA ports and many USB ports. It even had power brick which means no sound of PSU. It was like a dream. But the dream was over. It is out of stock this year. ((

What I have in my hands are ZOTAC D2700-ITX WiFi Supreme and ZOTAC D2550-ITX WiFi Supreme but both have fans for cooling which is awful. (Remember the silence.)

I found some intel boards for D2700 which has passive cooler on CPU (which is good) but GPU is Intel GMA which is baad (Am I wrong?).

Please don't suggest me ready media boxes (remember 2 harddrives). This HTPC will be used for watching 1080p media and NAS 7/24. It will not be used for gaming.

Please help me XBMC professionals. You are my only hope.

[borayeris]

Any suggestion?

[brywright]

Try foxconn at-5570. just got myself one and while i am running windows, it runs absolutely fine and best of all it uses 15 watts and no fans

[borayeris]

Thanks for your reply brywright but as I said before I don't want boxes. I will put two 3TB WD Green harddrive. I cannot fit them in foxconn at-5570.

Also I don't want AMD GPU. Linux support is awful.

[teaguecl]

I have an ION 330 based system (see my sig) which is fanless and literally silent - no moving parts. That's the problem with your suggested build, moving parts. Why eliminate fan noise, and then throw 3TB hard drives in? Those make more noise than a fan!
With that said, here's my $0.02:
- ION was great, but it's getting pretty old. It struggles on anything that requires lots of CPU horsepower, like streaming from the internet. It works fabulously on local media.
- If I were building silent today, I would go with the Android based ARM solutions. I don't know much of the technicals on those, I'd probably go with the Pivos since it's more officially supported by XBMC. Delete the Android junk, and just install Linux on it.
- Get rid of the hard drives in your HTPC and build a NAS.

Good luck!

[borayeris]

Thanks for your reply, teaguecl.

Harddrives will be WD Green which are so silent. If I can create a fanless system I can stand harddrive sound.

Android ARM was my first choice but as I said before ARM motherboards do not support SATA.

If I can be sure about Inter GMA 3650 Linux 1080p performance I may buy Intel D2700DC.

[lem000]

I have the D2550 with a blacknoise blacksilent pro fan instead of the normal one and the fan turned down in bios.
Very quiet (I use mine with a DAC for hifi audio)

My NAS is a separate device - 4 disks and a basic atom D525 board and tv tuner. This is quiet-ish, but lives in a different room.

A pile of wd greens aren't silent!

[borayeris]

@lem000; what is your GPU?

[BrainSlugs83]

I want to put 2 unit of 3 TB of WD green.

Then you will not be building an actual SILENT box. It may be quiet, but those drives are not noiseless.

As for the Intel GMA boards, I have an ATOM 330 with one, and I just stuck a PCI graphics card in there, it works fine for 1080p -- and the graphics card doesn't have any fans, just a big ass heat sink -- you could also do the same for your atom board -- pull off the heatsink and fan and just put a bigger heatsink on it if silence means that much to you -- though -- honestly -- the ATOM's fan is going to be less noisy than your array of hard drives. :-P(I know, because I've never heard my ATOM's fan when the case was on!)

Why not put those two hard drives into a desktop/server in another room/closet/whatever -- and stream the media from the network? Just about every OS supports software raid. -- Then you could boot from a thumb drive / SD card (or an SSD if you wanted to spend the money) on your bedroom PC.

EDIT: Also -- another option -- you could buy after market fans with low dBa ratings (I usually aim for 20 dBa or under -- 15 is ideal though -- for my silent builds -- on new egg you can crank up the air flow and crank down the dBa for any particular socket, and see what shows up in the fans sections -- you can even do this with case fans -- I.e. get rid of all your fans, and just put in one big case fan that is extremely quiet -- there are a lot of guides out there on building silent and near-silent PCs. -- some fans are rated in "sones" now -- sones are weird because they are linear instead of logarithmic -- so you need to do some advanced math to match sones to dBa -- or you could just do some memorization -- anyway, "1 sone" -- which is supposed to be "near silent" is about 29~30 dBa. -- though running builds with fans can be a bit more work, since you have to oil them every so often and dust them out to keep them clean and silent and keep them from wearing out as soon, and you have to replace them every so often -- etc.

[lem000]

@lem000; what is your GPU?

The Zotac D2550 has a geforce 610 on board. Nice little motherboard for Openelec. Plays everything and does decent deinterlacing of 1080i and HD Audio fomats.

[Alcomatt]

How loud does the Zotac get under full load?

[lem000]

Swap the fan for something better.. and the answer is 'not at all'.

[BrainSlugs83]

Swap the fan for something better.. and the answer is 'not at all'.

Exactly what I'm getting at with aftermarket fans -- for example, my hexacore Phenom II's stock fan was as sounded like a mini-jet engine under full-load -- replaced it with a 19 dBa fan with higher CFM rating [CFM = airflow, ignore RPM], and now it sounds quieter (under any load) than the old fan did idle -- and at any given load it's 2 - 5 degrees cooler -- and when going from full load to idle, it cools back down at about double the speed as the stock fan.

Guess how much it cost me? $19.86 USD (after shipping & handling / taxes on newegg). I threw in two HDMI cables (@ 2.99 each with free shipping), and < $26 takes my hexa-core to near silent, and I've got a couple of spare HDMI cables now. :-)

[Before you ask: No, I do not work at newegg, haha, I'm just saying.]

Seriously, if you run anything else in your bedroom -- HVAC -- a ceiling fan, air filter... all of that will be much louder than a near silent PC with fans -- you won't be able to hear it -- and with everything off, in dead-silence, it will still be pretty damn quiet (and there are even more tricks, including guides on how to sound proof your case for cheap -- I haven't tried this, but the guides are out there) -- just stay under 20 dBa for your fans (ideally 15 dBa -- and look for high CFM ratings) -- EXCEPT for those hard drives (I run a "server" with several WD Green Drives (2 x 1.5 TB, and 2 x 2 TB in it -- it's in it's own room, with some reasonably loud fans in the system to keep things cool -- they're configured as two RAID 0 arrays in hardware, and the two logical disks are soft-raid JBOD'd together in windows -- I call it a "franken-raid" -- at any rate, when heavy I/O occurs, those green drives are much louder than any of the case fans, etc. I can hear it churning from anywhere in the room. -- even in low/idle usage, they're still only slightly quieter than my loud server fans and I can still hear them churning -- but that's okay, because that's what this room is for: housing my torrent/"NAS" server, tools, and work bench-y type stuff. -- other computers throughout the house either have SSDs or IDE->SDCard Adapters [I bought a few of these a while back on some random website for about $15 each, they're a bit slow for I/O with standard class-4 SD cards, but they works fine for booting XBMC -- and I don't have to worry about if the mobo supports booting from a USB drive or not]).

Especially if you plan to torrent to those drives while you sleep -- those drives will be constantly churning.

Edit: Also another thought -- the OP mentioned there's no android with SATA support -- but, you can buy a SATA->USB2 adapter now for $3 to $5, and correct me if I'm wrong, but a lot of androids can do USB host, and will work fine with thumb drives (which is basically how these drives will show up) -- I'm not sure if android supports soft-raid or not -- but I'm thinking the limiting factor here would be USB 2 @ 480 Mb/s (i.e. that's 60 MB/s theoretical max for a completely saturated USB network) and not the drive's speed, so you probably wouldn't gain much with a soft-raid anyway (unless you had really slow drives) -- but I'm betting it would be plenty fast for playing videos, etc. -- though, it will still be loud.

[illiac4]

I have the same build with zotac 2550 board. I am using this one http://www.noctua.at/main.php?show=produ...=49&lng=en and the loudest part in htpc is disk. It is as silent as it gets with disk inside. I assume if there would be a ssd inside it would be totally silent as you can not hear the fan.
Even if you are going to use green line disks (which are btw. the shittiest for NAS and this is why WD has introduced red and black series) they will be loudest part in your build.

[warrmr]

Do you want to combine the NAS with the HTPC and run it constantly or would you go with two separate boxes.

You might want to take a look at an Icybox NAS4220-b it uses around 9watts on standby, and 20 watts with disk activity. The guys at nas-portal have successfully ported OpenWRT to the box and it works quite well. Mine cost around £250 4 years ago with a pair of 1TB disks. Not sure how well it works with 3TB disks but its worth a look

https://github.com/tobiaswaldvogel/openwrt-ib42x0