6. Storage

I had a couple of leftover 160 GB Western Digital Caviar IDE hard drives (WD1600JB) lying around that I threw into the HTPC on a temporary basis while I waited for a couple of 250 GB SATA drives to arrive. This was a mistake. I found out later that the Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition falls under Microsoft's new OEM rules, which were amended last year.

According to my research on the subject, I would need to purchase a new copy of XP MCE if I changed the hard drives. The combined 320 GB is a reasonably large amount of space, but I sure wish I had read the OEM rules before I installed the OS onto them, since 500 GB would have been much more comfortable.

Western Digital WD 1600 160 gigabyte hard drives.

I chose an NEC ND-2510A 8X DVDRW given the stability of NEC drives. It also has a nice large eject button that is easy to line up with the front bezel of the Silverstone case (I pulled off the face plate back in November to accommodate front panel of the Silverstone case and promptly lost it).

NEC ND-2510A 8X DVDRW