How to build a killer media center PC
If the only thing you want to do is stream Hitch on Netflix, then you can go ahead and skip this guide, and go check out all the media streamers that will surely meet your needs. If youve got the biggest TV of all your friends, a 7.2 surround sound system thats causing structural damage to your house, and yet you feel like something is still missing from your setup, then a media center PC might be just the trick.
Loading all of your movies, photos, music, and even video games wont be as easy as ordering a Roku on Amazon and waiting for it to arrive at your front door, but it will all be worth itwhen all you have to do is press one button on your remote to switch from Its Always Sunny toThe Lego Movie.
While you have a number of options for storing and playing back your media on a HTPC, one of the easiest and most reliable is an internal hard drive. A terabyte or two of storage gives you plenty of space to store movies, TV shows, and music, without having to worry about changing streaming services or renting Blu-ray discs. While a recent rise in the availability of streaming services has reduced the importance of internal storage, there are still plenty of sources for movies and music that require local storage.
Youll need to choose between a solid state drive and a mechanical drive for the Windows operating system. An SSD will feel quicker, but a traditional hard disk offers a much better per-gigabyte value, which is particularly appealing if you plan to store 4K movies locally.
Related:Seagate to 8TB hard drive for consumers
Cant decide? There are ways to compromise. You can buy a very small SSD for Windows alone and pair it with a big mechanical disk for files. There are also drives that blend a largesolid state cache with a disk, such as those from Seagate.
If you think anything less than a terabyte just wont do for your media files, buying a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device may be an even more efficient option. Rather than store all of your videos and photos locally, you could instead transfer them to a set of hard drives thats connected to your network.
Usually local networks have more than enough efficiency to carry even large files across your wireless network, and it comes along with a number of other advantages. Transferring files from your desktop to your HTPC is fast and easy, because you can just store them on the NAS, and youll have access to those files from all of your devices.
In some cases, the NAS may provide some extra features, such as access to the files from outside your local network, or redundant backups so that you never have to worry about permanently losing files. Its certainly an extra cost, but a few terabytes of networked storage in the right hands could be better than streaming.
Unlike most PCs, which benefit from more air-flow and a larger form factor, a HTPC should fit right in with the rest of the appliances around your television set. For this reason, most users choose a Mini or Micro ATX case and motherboard, rather than the standard ATX tower, since the cases are much smaller and come in various different dimensions.
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How to build a killer media center PC