Hi everyone, first time poster, long time lurker. Please be gentle!
I'm a bit of a beginner when it comes to putting together hardware, and I'm after a little help for a HTPC build. I currently run a Pivos XIOS M3, connected to 2 portable HDDs via an Airport Extreme. Needless to say, there's a bunch of issues with that set up so I'm after something a bit more robust, but still on a budget side. If I had it my way with a budget i'd probably go out an splurge on an Asus Eeebox just for the pure ease of it and aesthetics, but my bank account likes to put a dampener on that kind of thing.
I'm not looking for anything souped up to run 3D movies, but 1080P playback would be great.
Generally this is what I'm hoping to have:
OpenElec running on it via an SSD
Use it as a media server for my macbook, PS3 and XIOS to stream content from
Wireless
No need for optical drive
HDMI
A decent number of USB ports, preferable 3.0
Small footprint
Steam content from youtube/xbmc add ons
Download torrents automatically (not really a priority, I'm happy to do that separately on my macbook)
It's not the most demanding of requirements, but after investing in the XIOS, I was sorely disappointed. The biggest irk was that in order to stream any content from the HDDs connected to the AE unless I had mounted it on my macbook first. I'm hoping for a build that will serve as a NAS and media server and have minimal lag when scrolling through movies and TV shows. I plan on moving the XIOS to the spare tv for my nephew & niece when they stay over. The XIOS also has a dodgy method of mounting HDDs assigning them new locating names (USB01, USB02), depending on the sequence you plug HDDs in, instead of just following name paths, really screws up scraping.
I'd like to build this as budget as I can get away with, I'm happy to invest in a decent amount of RAM and an SSD if it means no lag. It drives me nuts at the moment. I'm currently located in Australia, so some of the stuff I've looked into on Amazon ends up costing a bit after taking postage into account if they don't post direct to Aus, those shipping forwarding business must make a killing.
Cheers everyone,
Sandgrouper.