PowerSpec B677 build questions

rboezeman

How many watts are available for addons using this 400 watt psu?

The system will be used for OTA tv recording and Hulu type streaming video.

Which make and model of case fan is used?

I will add a rear fan and will need the cable length. I may need a splitter cable if a second front fan can be added, what length?

I do not know if I will get new tuners or not, so I want to be prepared.

Since recordings are about 5 gig per hour per tuner, I had 4, lost 2, would a 2.5" SSD handle about 100 gig per day of recording, watching and deleting or is a mechanical drive better suited?

Can the extra parts be installed or is the extras just shipped?

TSKyleH

@rboezeman, the chassis supports two front fans. It comes with one 120mm fan installed by default, and you can add another 120mm fan of your choosing.  Any parts you wish to add would not be installed before it is shipped or picked up by you. If you want us to install the hardware you can bring it to our service department in a location near you. 

PowerSpec_MichaelB

rboezeman said:

How many watts are available for addons using this 400 watt psu?

The system will be used for OTA tv recording and Hulu type streaming video.

Which make and model of case fan is used?

I will add a rear fan and will need the cable length. I may need a splitter cable if a second front fan can be added, what length?

I do not know if I will get new tuners or not, so I want to be prepared.

Since recordings are about 5 gig per hour per tuner, I had 4, lost 2, would a 2.5" SSD handle about 100 gig per day of recording, watching and deleting or is a mechanical drive better suited?

Can the extra parts be installed or is the extras just shipped?

To add to what @TSKyleH provided, the system as configured would draw about 120W under full load, so you have roughly 280W of power overhead to utilize. Keep in mind that the 12V rail on that power supply is only 30A, meaning you only have 360W of 12V power available to you. This should only be a concern if you are adding a very high-end graphics card, which would be unnecessary for your intended use.

The brand of the fan should be a Lian Li fan, however it does not have a listed model or part number. The specifications for the fan is 4 pin PWN, 12V, 0.2A with a variable RPM of 800-1500.

For splitter length, you won't need anything too long given the smaller side of the Micro ATX chassis. Something like this should work fine and is only 4 inches: https://www.microcenter.com/product/438524/silverstone-1-to-3-pwm-fan-splitter. Just make sure you route the rear fan cable behind the motherboard tray, likely through the CPU power cable cutout. This will allow you to plug the rear fan and both front fans into a single cable, then attach to one of the marked fan headers below.

As to whether you should go with an SSD or HDD, there are going to be some tradeoffs here. For speed, SSD's are the clear choice, but for constant writing, HDD's have a durability advantage. SSD's have a very finite number of writes that they can handle before the flash simply wears down and fails. This is normally advertised as TBW or Terabytes Written. This durability rating is not an exact science, however it should give you a rough estimate of how long a particular SSD will last under constant writing load on average before you should be looking to replace them. Example: https://www.microcenter.com/product/600422/inland-premium-1tb-ssd-3d-nand-m2-2280-pcie-nvme-30-x4-internal-solid-state-drive

For this Inland 1TB NVMe SSD, it has an endurance raiting of 600TBW. This means the 1TB drive can be completely filled and wiped roughly 600 times before the flash has reached the end of its lifespan.

HDD's use mechanical heads that will eventually wear down over time, however they are better suited for constant writing and would have a much higher durability rating for this particular workload. The biggest caveats being that they consume more power than standard 2.5 inch SSD's and are magnitudes slower. One popular workaround to this that I've seen used would be to use a very small SSD for the OS, buy very large drives for mass storage, then buy another SSD to create a "block level cache" for the HDD. That way, you have the write durability of the HDD's, but the speed of an SSD when accessing frequently used files/content on the HDD. This might require some googling in order to figure out how to set it up, but I do intend to write a guide for our forum on how to create a block level cache like this, so stay tuned if that is of any interest!

I hope the information we provided is of use to you. If you have any questions, please let us know.

rboezeman

Thank you for the information.
Due to my location, near Raleigh, NC the system, etc. will need to be shipped.

Ian

rboezeman said:

Thank you for the information.
Due to my location, near Raleigh, NC the system, etc. will need to be shipped.

It looks like that is available for shipping.  At the top of our website, if you select "Micro Center Web Store" under "My Store", you can arrange shipping  by adding the item to your cart on the website.