Mini i7 Plexbox

[alex.perez]

Hey guys,

After hearing about the option of building a Hackintosh from a friend of mine for a good several months I decided to look into it as the alternative (a mac mini) didn't sound like it had enough horsepower. I run Plex throughout our house usually 1-3 devices are streaming at a time. This works pretty well minus it turning my MBP into a server so in order to allow my macbook to be a laptop again I am exploring the world of hackintosh.

So far I am planning to pretty much stick with the CustoMac Mini Deluxe and go with the i7-3770k. I have picked a different Case in order to have more hard drive room and it looks nifty, it is the Lian LI PC-Q08B mini itx tower I'm hoping that will work.. Also do you guys think the 240gb solidstate is necessary or would 120 be fine? all that will be on it is the OS and a few programs, Plex obviously, as well as hand handbreak, unison, Ut*****t, SABnzb, sickbeard, and couch potato. As far as Storage I was thinking 6 of the WD 3TB red drives. I am not planning on using a graphics card since it isn't needed with plex and from my understanding the k processor does processing enough to meet all my uses. I'm not sure how helpful the corsair liquid cpu cooler would be but as of now I don't have it included in my parts list. The rest of my parts are what are recommended under mini deluxe build.

If any of you guys have used that case and or have advice on solid state memory or my hard-drive selection I would love to hear it as well as any other advice with starting my first build.

Thanks,

Alex

 

[miramar]

The Zomac build in my sig is being used as a Plex Media Server. Currently it's directly connected to my LCD TV and it's usually streaming to 2 iPads and sometimes an iPhone simultaneously. Works pretty well. I'm using a medium sized miniITX case with a 240GB SSD as my boot drive and 2 x 3TB HD for media. There's still space for another 2 3.5" HDs internally.

 

[alex.perez]

do you feel like the 240gb is helpful or do you think 120 would suffice due to plex and ios not taking up much space?

 

[miramar]

do you feel like the 240gb is helpful or do you think 120 would suffice due to plex and ios not taking up much space?

I used it for work as well, that's why I needed the 240GB. 120GB should suffice if you're just running PMS. For me, 240GB is the sweet spot in terms of cost and space. I find 120GB not quite enough for my needs and 512MB is way out of my budget. In fact my MacBook Pro has a 240GB SSD too.

 

[anix]

I have the Q08B here, lurking on my desk - anything special, you want to know?
I've used it previously for a NAS, but now want to swap the board and make it a hackintosh

 

[alex.perez]

sweet, how many full size drives can you fit in there i would like to run 6 3.5s and one 2.5 flash startup drive. I wont be using a graphics card so i'm assuming id have space? also do you think i would be able to fit a cpu water cooling kit?

 

[Einsteiniac]

sweet, how many full size drives can you fit in there i would like to run 6 3.5s and one 2.5 flash startup drive. I wont be using a graphics card so i'm assuming id have space? also do you think i would be able to fit a cpu water cooling kit?

How will you be managing these 6 drives? Are you using a hardware RAID controller? Onboard RAID will not work.

 

[alex.perez]

Thanks for mentioning that I wasn't aware of it and when you said something I looked into it further, what is a good option as far as raid is concerned or are there better options for hard drives I would like to run 6 storage drives each between 2 and 4 tb in addition to my startup drive. ?? I'm sure I sound like a complete n00b and frankly thats not far off This will be my first computer build so I'm learning it as i go.


Side question since I am not running a graphics card will i need the 650 power supply or could i get away with something a bit smaller. I am still planning to go with the aforementioned i7k but I am not sure if that alone warrants such a relatively big power supply.

 

[Einsteiniac]

Thanks for mentioning that I wasn't aware of it and when you said something I looked into it further, what is a good option as far as raid is concerned or are there better options for hard drives I would like to run 6 storage drives each between 2 and 4 tb in addition to my startup drive. ?? I'm sure I sound like a complete n00b and frankly thats not far off This will be my first computer build so I'm learning it as i go.


Side question since I am not running a graphics card will i need the 650 power supply or could i get away with something a bit smaller. I am still planning to go with the aforementioned i7k but I am not sure if that alone warrants such a relatively big power supply.

Well plugging them in is just part of the equation. Do you want them to show as one volume or do you want 6 separate disks on the desktop with no data protection?

 

[alex.perez]

I would like it to be one volume large volume, however I would like it set up in such a way that if a drive fails for some reasons the data is backed up.