So I need System Recommendations for an Audiophile.

[JustinC939]

So I've been service a PC for a friend of mine for the past several years. It's mostly composed of hand me downs from my old PCs, and it's become somewhat of a frankenstein. I recently had to replace a bad mobo in it and complained about things running rather slow.

He's running an AMD Athlon 64 X2 4200+ 2GB DDR, on Windows 7 which is old hardware, but should be an adequate system to say the least. But he has a 1TB HDD nearly full of music from his CD collection, and he runs iTunes. I know iTunes can be a hog and having such a massive music collection would only make matters worse in that regard. Not to mention that he still has probably 300-400GB of music that has yet to be ripped to iTunes from his CDs which will probably require about 1.5TBs of storage. On top of this, he runs apps that allow him to access his iTunes from anywhere on his iPhone which only increases the load.
Also, it's taken him quite a while to rip his CDs and a HDD failure would be devastating because of the time it took to do all of this.

So he asked me about a more powerful system, and I think it would be a good idea to start from scratch using new components, as you really don't save alot of money when building PCs out of used parts.


I honestly haven't had the need to build anything high end for myself or anyone else, so I'm not too familiar with whats out there, but here are my thoughts, and I would appreciate suggestions and recommendations as to what a good build would be for this purpose.

• Quad Core CPU
• 8GB of DDR3
• PCIe Hardware RAID Controller
• 2x 2TB HDDs @ RAID 1 (4x @ RAID 10 if he can afford it)
• 60-120GB SSD for the Operating system
• Low-mid end graphics card
• Most likely will go with a full tower ATX setup for better cooling, and more HDD slots
• 550-600w PSU?

Thanks in advance.

[JustinC939]

[hunter4u]

why not talk him into a nas unit? One that he can access from the net?
One you can set up in raid 10

•4 x 1TB, RAID 10 : 2TB available space, 180 MB/s write, 190 MB/s read

[richardd43]

I agree with the NAS unit. I have about 1.5T of movies on mine and love it.

I use 2 2T drives in RAID 1

With a good NAS unit you also have the option of being able to access it from the net.

[oralpain]

With four rotating platter HDDs, a dedicated hardware RAID card is going to be of dubious value, especially for low overhead uses like RAID 0 or 10.

9 times out of 10 it won't be perceptibly faster than something like an ICH9R/10R or any of the newer Intel PCHes.

Might be worthwhile for RAID 5 or 6, but unless you are going to use more than six drives, or more than two fast SSDs, it's not going to be a good value.