HTPC build!

A while ago my wife asked me if it were possible to remove all the DVDs we had on a couple shelves and put them in the loft and ‘somehow’ put them on to the computer so we could watch the movies…  naturally my mind went straight to building or buying a media centre/HTPC.  After looking around I found some nice small systems, such as the systems by Acer or Zotac.  However, they either didn’t come with a blu-ray player, or didn’t have room in the case to add to in the future (such as adding a tv tuner card or similar).  So after a long while, I finally decided I may as well just build the darned thing!  (OK, so it wasn’t much of a push that I needed to buy lots of computer components and build a new PC…)

This is what we went and ordered this past weekend:

• Antex Fusion Remote case
  probably a little bigger than I wanted, but lots of people seemed to like it
• AMD Phenom II X4 955 CPU
  may as well have something that can encode reasonably well!
• Asus Micro-ATX M4a785 HTPC mobo
• LG Blu-ray reader/DVD multi-format burner
• 2GB Crucial RAM
• ATI HD 5450 graphics card
  even though mobo has the 4200 line built-in, I think it’ll be better to use a dedicated card
• Logitech diNovo Mini keyboard

Got a few other things as well, such as a wifi card, bluetooth dongle, etc.  The only thing I don’t currently have is a hard drive.  I’m thinking of a small, fast drive for the program partition and a couple large drives in RAID 1…  Actually, is that possible?  Can I have one drive in the computer not in raid and two others in raid?  Or is it a case of they all need to be in some format of raid or not at all?  Guess I’ll soon find out!

Very excited about all of this… Some parts have already been allocated and invoiced, so hopefully have everything within the next 10 or so days.