[evilspoons]

Hi everyone,

I have a HTPC I built recently that is currently using an old 320 GB Seagate drive as a boot disk because it's what I had laying around. Files are currently pulled over the network, but I want them to be stored in the HTPC eventually.

I now have available:

1x 500 GB Seagate 2.5" laptop drive
1x Western Digital Caviar Green 1 TB
1x Seagate Barracuda LP 2 TB (brand new)

The 320 GB drive seems loud to me. Which of these three should I put Windows on? I plan on having the 2 TB in there in some fashion for storage, but I'm not sure if it should also have Windows on it or if I should maybe use the laptop drive since it'll be quiet (in theory).

Case is a Silverstone ML03B. I can cram three hard drives in there, in theory, since I don't have an optical drive.

[T800]

Depends what's more important to you. I would sell the 500GB and 1TB to fund an SSD. It will be quiet and very fast.

[Kirky99]

Yeah, in theory you can fit those, but in my experience, room is tight! The area under my BR Drive is PACKED with wires, I think that is one of the mounting locations, but I had trouble making heads or tails of the directions.

I put a 60G SSD drive between the PS and the DVD drive, and mounted a 500G 2.5" laptop drive behind the power button area. When I had a full size 3.5" drive, it ran really hot. Air circulation doesn't seem all that great in that case to begin with so I'm not sure I would put too many spinners in there.

Put your OS on a SSD and get a good laptop drive for storage would be my preference. All my 3.5" drive are in my file server in a big honking case with lots of case fans several rooms away. If you really need that much storage, a seperate file server or NAS type device would be where I'd steer anyone.

[eskro]

i agree with the SSD suggestion