VoodooPC plans 8TB media PC

When we heard that VoodooPC was planning a media PC with 16 drive bays and a maximum capacity of 8 terabytes, our first thought wasn't, "what are we going to do with all that space?" No, it was, "what, only 8TB?" After all, if you've got 16 bays, why not put a full TB in each one, instead of a measly 500GB (which is the total capacity of Voodoo's current media PC, the Aria, pictured)? Especially if this is going to be a media PC designed for HD? Regardless, Voodoo apparently plans to release the PC around the same time Windows Vista hits the market, which means it'll presumably come with Vista Home Premium, the version that includes the media features currently in Windows XP MCE. At this point, Voodoo says the box will come out later this year, though, of course, Vista delays could slow that timeline. Which is fine with us, since we're going to need a little time to save the $8,000 this bad boy is expected to cost.

[mikeray @ Feb 28th 2006 5:40PM]

that price is so lame for something that isn't even that amazing. sure it can do cool things, but you can do the same things on a normal computer if you just set it up yourself. this whole 'media pc' thing is such a gimmick!

[BrianL @ Feb 28th 2006 5:46PM]

Holy Hell, 8TB? I wish I had 8TB in my PSP :/

[Scoobydoo @ Feb 28th 2006 5:47PM]

The reason they didn't put 1Tb in each drive bay is probably because there are no 1Tb drives. 500Gb is the largest you can get.

[Handsome Jon @ Feb 28th 2006 5:47PM]

How many hours of HDTV are we talking?

[glacia00 @ Feb 28th 2006 6:07PM]

Very nice job. A little pricey but Voodoo has done a really good jod with this. I know some people hate the component form factor but it deffinately makes sense for media PCs. I'm not crazy about the 'infineon RED' shown here but the brushed, anodized, machined, black chassis is very much my cup o' tea and costs $348 less.

[Tony @ Feb 28th 2006 6:08PM]

"How many hours of HDTV are we talking"

About 2.5 hours.

[guano @ Feb 28th 2006 6:10PM]

Hmmm, $1 for each gigabyte? That's kind of funny.

[sammy mazola jr� @ Feb 28th 2006 6:11PM]

But what has this got to do with Apple?

[Ikzann @ Feb 28th 2006 6:12PM]

1 hour of HDTV = 9GB

8000/9 = 888 8/9 hours.

[Alex @ Feb 28th 2006 6:23PM]

So that's over a month of continuous HD content. And if you wanted to make a full-time job of it, you'd have that job for 5 months with weekends off. That's a lot of content. Let's see who fills it first.

[dueport @ Feb 28th 2006 6:24PM]

More than HD recording my friends - the earlier Voodoo Media Center PC allowed for DVD *ripping* - imagine 8 TB of an entire ripped DVD collection - plus the normal ripped music collection, photos, and tv shows....sweet jesus....this is the future my friends - all available at the touch of a button....now if only I had that $8000 :-)

[NelsonD @ Feb 28th 2006 6:41PM]

#7

Who said it had anything to do with Apple?

And the piercing red wouldn't really look good with all my silver and black stereo equipment...

[Bo @ Feb 28th 2006 7:01PM]

This is more of a cool factor than anything else. I already see some flaws.

Imagine all the noise from the hard drives and fans required to cool this monster, not to mention power efficiency. As a MCE computer this is the most important factor. I highly doubt it will support raid-0 for all the 16 drives so you will have multiple spans of drive letters. Best configuration I can think of for performance is RAID-0 on four drives for system and two RAID-0 on 6 drives as storage.

I'd rather use the money for NAS TB drives instead.

[Corey Gouker @ Feb 28th 2006 7:02PM]

"which means it'll presumably come with Vista Home Premium, the version that includes the media features currently in Windows XP MCE"

With 8TB of space and it being a premium MCE box I'd expect it to come with Vista Ultimate which also has the MCE features.

[Ikzann @ Feb 28th 2006 7:09PM]

Your comments: Hmmmm...

$320 500GB HDs * 16 = $5120
Case: $150
Processor, motherboard, power supply, video card: ~$500
Windows MCE: ~$150
Total: $5920

[dave @ Feb 28th 2006 7:12PM]

"7. But what has this got to do with Apple?"

What are you talking about? Nobody said it has anything to do with Apple.

[Yrian @ Feb 28th 2006 7:39PM]

ROFL. I wonder what kind of content a media PC dubbed "Aria" and painted satin red was meant to store and play back. . .

[Dubiousd @ Feb 28th 2006 9:01PM]

This is not an accurate esitmation:

Case: $150
Processor, motherboard, power supply, video card: $500

Should be:

Case: $650 (Case w/LCD)
CPU: $500
Mobo: $150
PSU: $150
Video: $250
RAM: $200
DVD-ROM: $50
Heatsink: $50

Total: $2000

[Ikzann @ Feb 28th 2006 9:09PM]

Didn't realize the case had an LCD.

I doubt it will have a $250 video card. Anyway, I knew my estimates would be off.

So total: ~$7000

[dave @ Feb 28th 2006 9:33PM]

Should be:

Case: $650 (Case w/LCD)
CPU: $500
Mobo: $150
PSU: $150
Video: $250
RAM: $200
DVD-ROM: $50
Heatsink: $50

Total: $2000

[dave @ Feb 28th 2006 9:36PM]

Sorry, I included the quote but forgot to type my own! :(

I was going to say plus the $5120 for the hard drives of course, bringing it up above $7000.

[BigG @ Feb 28th 2006 10:41PM]

I agree. getting TB NAS is a better way to go. Remove the noisy drives to a closet and you can find them for $600-$700 a piece.

[Cedrik @ Feb 28th 2006 10:47PM]

At that point, I think a person with that volume of storage, and that amount of money, will have a network of storage. NAS, etc. You dont need all 8 TB in one box, IMHO. 1 is plenty for a Sratch C. Then NAS the rest. Keep it away from your computer, keep the noise and heat down.

[Humjaba @ Feb 28th 2006 10:57PM]

DO NOT BUY VOODOOPC! Mwah. Ok, so ill support this. A friend of mine bought a VooDooPC about a year ago. It was top of the line at the time (forget the exact specs), and he was excited when he ordered it. The trouble started there. After he had bought it, he priced it out if he had built it himself and figured out he could have saved $1500 by doing it himself.

Ok, not so bad. But then, he waited. And waited. And waited. A month after ordering, he gets an email that his computer was waiting on parts or something, so they upgraded his ram for free. Ok, still not so bad. Another month passes by, and he finally gets the email that his PC has been shipped.

So his computer arrives about a week later, and he's all excited. He hooks it up, starts it up, and plays some DC Final. Everything's fine for about a week, at which point the computer stops working.

Being a tech guy, he knew that the motherboard had gone bad (dont ask me how he knew; it's beyond me). So he calls them up and sends it in. He has to pay for shipping. He gets an email about a month later that they had fixed his computer and that it only needed a BIOS update.

The computer arrives at his doorstep a month later. Now, it's been almost 4 months and he's only had it for a week. So he shrugs it off and plays for about another month.

Then, the same problem starts happening AGAIN. So he sends it in, the replace the motherboard, and he gets his comp back in another month. It's been fine since then. BUT! The morale of the story: VooDooPC sucks. It's overpriced, their service sucks, and I personally find their cases very ugly. But that's just me.

Rawr.

[dill @ Mar 1st 2006 12:01AM]

#12 is an idiot.

For large block sequential read/write's typical of multimedia, RAID 5 would be fine. RAID 0 with 16 drives? Asinine.

Folks, this is a windows computer. If all the drives cannot fit into one RAID5 set, use windows volume spanning. Its a DVR. Yes, it will have asymmetric performance across the two or more sets being spanned, but it wont matter. It will still all be one drive letter. And it will be plenty fast & wont wipe out your whole collection when one of the 16 drives goes bad.

Seriously.

[Hardware Help @ Mar 1st 2006 12:27AM]

Nice. Its all about bragging rights. I would still prefer to build my own and save a couple grand though.

[brian @ Mar 1st 2006 1:59AM]

18TB!!!

Build your own? But it will never be up to par with this monster; look at that sweet LCD screeN!

Personally, red is not 'the' color; Voodoo should know better and stick with black.

[Wayde @ Mar 1st 2006 4:45AM]

For all of those moaning about building your own, just do it, dont moan on here about it. While most of us on here have the technical know-how to do this, your average person (with money!) who wants a nice media setup will go for this. The integrated monitor is pretty cool, and it looks like it belongs next to your TV. You dont want it, dont buy it.

[Linh @ Mar 1st 2006 6:45AM]

Um... are we going to have to start having SAN's in the home soon?

[jp @ Mar 1st 2006 6:50AM]

How on earth would you back this up?!?!?

[glacia00 @ Mar 1st 2006 11:37AM]

Regarding the complaint about the color (The Infineon red isn't my bag either) the voodoo stuff including this comes in more colors that probably any other mfg. Certainly more than you can shake an average sized stick at.

I have a half dozen friends who have bought from Voodoo at various times and have had only the most minor issues. They make some of the best looking computers available. Their designs aren't for everybody. You could view them as the anti-apple but in a good way.

Apple = shiny happy "Can't we all just get along."
Voodoo = Chip on shoulder "You lookin' at me punk?"

[Brian @ Mar 1st 2006 1:01PM]

RE 21: It's not the noisy drives anymore that you have to worry about. Seagate and Samsung have some extremely quiet SATA drives.

What you gotta worry about is cooling, thats gonna give you all your noise.

[Parker @ Mar 2nd 2006 12:36AM]

People should stop complaining about the price. Can you build it yourself for cheaper? Sure!, so go do it. The graphics card in the current one is 7800 GT. This thing will have to have an awesome GC with things like HDCP or you wont be able to play your content, due to the whole new DRM stuff. Voodoo puts a lot of custom stuff in the box too. You can also pick from 11 colors, black being the standard and cheapest. People also need to realize they are a business and need to make money. If they sell it to you at cost then they will go out of business. If you don't like it, don't buy it.

[Jason Zions @ Mar 2nd 2006 2:04PM]

In your costing estimates, you forgot the RAID controller. You don't want software RAID-5 in these capacities, and the low-end SATA add-in cards typically support only RAID-0 and RAID-1.

If I were building something like this, I'd probably use the 3Ware 12-port RAID card. (They don't make a 16-port, sad to say.) Around $800 retail. And for best performance you'll need a 64-bit PCI slot.

Alternatively, you could get a pair of Highpoint RocketRaid 2320 cards, each of which supports 8 ports and requires a PCI-E X4 slot. With 24 lanes available on the standard mobo, 16 are used for video; I don't think anyone makes a mobo which puts the remaining lanes on a pair of X4 slots.

If this is going to be a high-performance system, then Voodoo is going to be doing some custom engineering or using some seriously high-end parts to get the job done.

[henry eight @ Jul 27th 2006 6:07AM]

Yup, this could be neat... definitely gotta backup, considering the quantity of data stored and the fact it just _might_ be hard to replace... let's say we give it a really good MoBo, quality RAM, and (64-bit, SATA2)RAID 6. Now give it redundant solid-state-microswitch power supplies (old terminology, sorry, y'know, the ones like laptop power supplies -- they don't have noisy fans). Use a Pentium-M processor to keep heat and noise down, maybe one of those nifty new dual-cores. SATA drives have really impressed me in the low-noise department (among others). Proper case design can help keep convection currents moving the air around the drives, circulating without need for compression fans like my old ProLiant server had for its RAID drive cage. That thing shook the whole frame of the house until I rubber-mounted it!