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Ballpark figures, this isn't exact, redo it with your preferred constants, I'm just trying to explain my reasoning against huge enclosures with > 10 drives,

Standard drive idle usage (W) ~ 10W [1]
Low-power (green) drive idle usage (W) ~ 5W [1]
Cost of power ~0.20 $/KWH
Cost of an older drive per year = $17
Cost of a green drive per year = $8.50
Replacing 6x500GB older drives with one 3TB green power savings = $95/yr

So think about that for a sec. At $150[2] for a 3TB drive, you cover the price in power savings in 18 months. That's assuming that there is zero fixed-cost per drive. At the point where you are talking about adding SATA controllers or fancy multi-bay enclosures or, worse, external enclosures with their own PSUs (and fans!), the turnaround-point for older drives is far sooner.

I'm a hobbyist, I understand that it's really cool to make do with older hardware and feel like you aren't letting anything to go waste but sometimes using old hardware instead of buying new is penny-wise and pound-foolish. Spending money on increasing how many hard drives you can accommodate instead of just buying newer high-capacity lower-wattage drives is absolutely batty; especially when you get into the price for anything remotely good in the RAID dept.

My advice, move everything to the largest capacity drives that are reasonably priced (after the flood damage is sorted). Replace the drives when you can do between 4:1 and 6:1 replacement -- should be every 3-4 years. Live happily, quietly and simpler. Save money on power transparently.

[1] http://hothardware.com/Reviews/Western-Digital-2TB-Caviar-Green-Power-Hard-Drive/
[2] I bought some Hitachi 3TBs before the Thailand floods at $130 on Newegg. Of course you would be silly as heck to buy hard drives now for your hobby storage project before they at least fall back to pre-flood level.
[3] http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817182221
[4] Older drives need not go to waste, they can become offline storage with a simple USB dock[3] -- make a backup, throw it in an anti-static bag, leave it at your relative's house when you visit!
[5] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hard_drive_capacity_over_time.svg

May I suggest setting up a NAS? Wherever you like (garage, or wherever). You can set it up with RAID, and use it as a backup server too if you would like. This way, you don't need to get rid of your current system but just add up. There are a few of them now with plenty of HDD space and flexible RAID configuration, so that you don't have to get all HDDs with same capacity, specifications, etc. Therefore, you can even upgrade HDDs as you go. I personally have Synology DS1511 in my wishlist, although it is not a cheap toy. I don't feel I know enough to recommend any other file system. ext3,ext4, NTFS are what I use currently and I am naive if I am missing anything. Similarly, I don't know much about the differences between various linux flavors and BSD, therefore I think whichever you are most comfortable with should serve you well. x264/mkv is the format I use too, even for my blueray backups. It serves me well, and I personally don't plan to change it any time soon.

I have been using Ubuntu server and Playstation Media Server (Don't let the name fool you. As for storage use XFS because it's tailor made to server large files. For storage these racks have colling fans and are allummium http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816111045 and I just add hard rives as needed. The laundry room worked best for me.

Few people have any real need to sacrifice stability for a little more speed. Overclocking is pretty pointless for anyone with a modern CPU.

Not true... For example, Intels i7 2700K is an unlocked chip basically intended for overclocking. The stock speed is 3.5 GHz but with a simple Corsair Water Cooler just about anyone can get a stable overclock to 4.7GHz and that makes a huge difference in any CPU limited games and video transcoding. There are people going as high as 5.2GHz and stable on simple all-in-one water coolers like the H100.

While I agree that the E-450 isn't a bad chip if it were me I'd be looking at something like this E-350 board for less than $100 that not only takes 8gb of DDR 3 (cheap ATM) but also has a PCIe slot so you can even go hybrid crossfire later to get even more performance out of it.

But you are absolutely 100% correct when it comes to Intel not having anything in that price range. I tried several Atom units and frankly even with XP they were painful to use, and with Win 7 Starter it was just awful. My E-350 is frankly delightful to use, is always snappy, and with 8Gb of RAM superfetch keeps ALL my apps preloaded into memory, ready to go instantly. All the Atom units I saw had 2Gb RAM limitations thanks to Intel being afraid of killing their shitastic Celeron sales.

Frankly that is why i don't understand everyone saying "Herp derp AMD can't compete herp derp" when frankly the ultra top end market has ALWAYS been a teeny tiny niche compared to mainstream and value which is a HUGE market. And lets face it as you said its not the CPU that is the bottleneck in most apps, its the GPU and/or the HDD. I think AMD has gone down the right route in making sure that even their low end have damn nice GPUs because the world is becoming more multimedia heavy by the day and with OpenCL more and more apps are gonna be able to take advantage of that GPU

I'm just glad I scored my EEE when I did along with picking up a Thuban 6 core earlier this month when I found out they have killed the AM3 socket. i don't know if you heard but the Bobcat and Bulldozer sales were so fricking huge (which really doesn't sound like "they can't compete" to me) that they went ahead and killed AM3 a couple of quarters early just so they could give that fab capacity to Bobcat and Bulldozer. I walk into Best Buy or Walmart and where once was Intel all the way down frankly there is only a couple of $1000+ Intel units and ALL the rest of their stock is AMD. And you look at Tiger or Newegg and they have the Bobcat in everything from netbooks to HTPCs to all in ones.

So I personally would say the numbers are showing AMD is competing just fine. After all you can't sell more chips than you can make and AMD has both TMSC and GloFlo cranking chips as fast as they possibly can and still can't meet demand. HP and Gateway are cranking out A Series laptops like there is no tomorrow and Asus and Acer are cranking out E and C series netbooks as fast as they can roll them out the factory. I know that trying to score one on Cyber monday was impossible, while Atom laptops were going for as low as $189 I never saw them go out of stock. meanwhile I went everywhere from Amazon to tiger looking to score an E or C series for a family friend and all I saw from 2AM on on cyber Monday was "sold out". I'd say the numbers are showing both that netbooks still have plenty of life with good chips and that AMD putting powerful GPUs in their units is the right way to go.

Of course you ought to see the looks on people's faces when i'm doing sweet jumps in Vice City or bashing zombies in L4D on my little EEE, I've even had a few ask me why I was watching a video of a game because they simply can't believe a little unit like that can game!

Netbook prices:
Best Buy: $99.99 to $4,648.60
Newegg: $299.99 to $698.99 ($229.99 referb)
Circuit city: $319.99 to $629.99
Target: $242.99 to $599.99
Walmart: $278.00 to $632.00

Yep fraid so, it was announced Dec 5th by the CEO himself. The skinny is they are having such a run on Bobcat and Bulldozer (Bobcat has become the "go to" chip for the OEMs, its in everything from netbooks to HTPCs to all in ones, and the A series is getting sucked up by HP and Gateway for quad laptops) that GloFlo and TSMC can't keep up with production of those AND the AM3s, so instead of losing their higher profit chips they just killed the AM3s. I originally read it through the email daily links I get from El Reg but here is an older link that says they planned to end them in 2012, so they only upped their plans by a couple of quarters.

Sorry I can't find the original link but I'm kinda swamped with the silly season ATM. you might want to try the reg as i'm pretty sure that is where I read it and they confirmed that it IS officially the end of AM3, all that is left is the last chips that came off the line and what is in stock. i know that after i heard the news i went shopping for a Thuban and it took me three Etailers before i found a 95w Thuban left, the rest was sold out. if I'd have known ECS were lying bastards and i'd have to change my board i'd have gotten a 125 watter, but with this 1035t idling at 72 f and under load less than 100 f I really can't complain. but if you want one of the new chips better pull the trigger friend, because they won't last long!

BTW if you have a board that can take it these Thubans are fricking swwwweeeeet dude! Six cores of creamy goodness, turbo for when you aren't using all six cores, and actually seems to use less power and generate less heat than my Deneb did. With this new Asrock board (which I also recommend highly BTW, this baby has features I've only seen on $200+ boards) its just too nice. Anyway here is the chip and here is the cooler and I can tell you the three fit together like hand in glove. i had 8gb of DDR 2 RAM already so I figure I'm set for a good 5 years or more easy, since i haven't even OCed yet.

But if I was you and I wanted one i'd pull the trigger, because as you can see on the chart i linked to they were planning to kill AM3 by January anyway so its only a month off original roadmap, and man these chips are nice dude, damned nice. Score you a good 6 or quad and you'll be set for awhile, otherwise you'll be looking at the board needing replaced as well.

It's not like Nokia phones are going to be any different from other vendors' WP7 phones, despite the privileged position Nokia has. Their real chance to be different was with the N9, and by all accounts the phone is a success in the markets it was launched in. People love it -- if they can get it. Carrier subsidizing is the only "feature" that is missing. But good news Newegg now carries it! ($630) so no dealing with shady importers.

I hate my Android, but I'll likely go back to iPhone, unless I swing the N9 for xmas. Yeah, I'm not even a year into the Atrix and I'm looking to spend another $630 because Android is crap. I prefer a "walled garden" to an open field of shit. I'm only waiting to see how the iPhone 5 changes things.

Well, first of all, I have SSDs in every computer I own (2 desktops - win7/fedora15, htpc running f14+xbmc, macbook air) and the average joe will absolutely see a massive difference. Have you ever used a desktop computer with an SSD? The difference is absolutely shocking. Also, of the 4 SSDs I own (including all the way back to the original OCZ Vertex) I have never had a single failure. Feel free to believe angry anecdotal evidence on the Internet, but I have actual real world experience with them, and I cannot recommend them highly enough.

Cost is absolutely a concern, and that has to be weighed against opportunity cost of completing these projects. SSDs are down to about $1.50/GB. I'd be more than happy to replace the 300-500GB HDD that I'm getting in workstations now with 30GB SSDs and go from $40 to mabye $45? I'd also use a fraction of the power, produce nearly no heat, make no noise and be able to sustain a 1500g shock. The machines we're rolling out are all kiosks in a healthcare environment and won't have anything other than a web browser and Microsoft Office installed. And if they happen to fail I'll RMA it (under warranty, ocz offers 3 year warranty directly, plus OEM warranty of course) and have another one in place within 24 hours.

You've no doubt built a very good system there. I used to do the same thing when I built my own computers - get enterprise grade components wherever I could.

Look at SSD though. You can get a 60GB SSD for $80 that will be at least a factor of 10-100 faster than the drives you've got.
10-100x the iops.
Seek times reduced from over 10ms to around 0.1ms
Something like 500MB/sec data transfer rate
Lower power consumption.
Lower noise.
No moving parts.
MTBF of 2 million hours.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227737

And perfect is the enemy of good. Who cares if the picture is a little "better" which frankly is subjective, when you are talking about having more than FIVE TIMES the amount of power used? the new LCDs i got the boys are energy star and take a MAX of 35w each and that is with built in speakers. The 19 inch CRTs they replaced i looked up on the manufacturer's website and they were using 135w EACH.!

70 watts VS 270, not really a hard choice to make friend and BTW you know what the boys said about their new monitors? 'The picture is so bright, everything looks so crisp and sharp, I LOVE IT!" Sure if you are making your living running Photoshop i can see going IPS or keeping the CRT but frankly the new TFT LCDs are more than "good enough" for the vast majority or they wouldn't be selling like hotcakes now would they?

Personally i think the Hanns_G monitors look DAMNED good to my eyes, and if anybody wants one they have them for just $10 more than i paid so you can pick them up for $89 shipped. If anybody wants to replace a power sucking CRT I highly recommend, the speakers aren't the bassiest of things but with the kids regular speakers moved to the back it does make a nice set of front speakers.

able to outperform hybrid drive systems by more than 2X (PC Mark Vantage HDD test) and HDD-only systems by as much as 4X (PC Mark Vantage HDD test) and deliver a 60% performance improvement over HDD-only systems in PC Mark Vantage Suite.

I just built a system with this motherboard, and while I haven't run any benchmarks, it does seem to be very fast.

I wonder if QuantumMist must take into account the cost of development. To say that the application is "embarassingly parallel" and at the same time that "memory requirements are decently low" suggests that s/he has an existing application that has been run on some box and perhaps belies a bit of ignorance about the nature of parallelism. Last time I checked, more threads required more memory. If the plan is to get the maximum number of threads possible, the amount of memory required could vary enormously. Additionally, the nature of the parallelism is not discussed. What does each thread do? If it's not something a GPU does then GPUs are not going to help. Also, will a GPU even fit in a 1u box that already contains a server? I doubt it.

In my very limited experience in writing multithreaded code, I have found that simply increasing the number of threads spawned doesn't necessarily equate to better performance. On the contrary, spawning too many can bring your application to a halt as an enormous number of threads vie for limited resources (network, disk, memory) and your application gets nothing done because it's too busy context switching between a huge number of resource-starved threads that do nothing while the threads that hold the resources never get scheduled to do valuable work.

I'd also like to point out that simply buying GPUs doesn't mean your application will suddenly spawn an ability to take advantage of even one GPU. The software development effort required to add GPU detection and utilization could easily chew up that $10-15k budget in no time.

If QuantumMist already has this application written and it's running but NOT GPU-enabled, then the best approach might be to just get the hottest multi-socket traditional CPU machine s/he can afford built on a dual LGA 1366 mobo or quad g34 mobo. Or, depending on the nature of this parallelism, it might be better to budget for some CUDA software development and a machine with a couple of GPUs.

I wonder if QuantumMist must take into account the cost of development. To say that the application is "embarassingly parallel" and at the same time that "memory requirements are decently low" suggests that s/he has an existing application that has been run on some box and perhaps belies a bit of ignorance about the nature of parallelism. Last time I checked, more threads required more memory. If the plan is to get the maximum number of threads possible, the amount of memory required could vary enormously. Additionally, the nature of the parallelism is not discussed. What does each thread do? If it's not something a GPU does then GPUs are not going to help. Also, will a GPU even fit in a 1u box that already contains a server? I doubt it.

In my very limited experience in writing multithreaded code, I have found that simply increasing the number of threads spawned doesn't necessarily equate to better performance. On the contrary, spawning too many can bring your application to a halt as an enormous number of threads vie for limited resources (network, disk, memory) and your application gets nothing done because it's too busy context switching between a huge number of resource-starved threads that do nothing while the threads that hold the resources never get scheduled to do valuable work.

I'd also like to point out that simply buying GPUs doesn't mean your application will suddenly spawn an ability to take advantage of even one GPU. The software development effort required to add GPU detection and utilization could easily chew up that $10-15k budget in no time.

If QuantumMist already has this application written and it's running but NOT GPU-enabled, then the best approach might be to just get the hottest multi-socket traditional CPU machine s/he can afford built on a dual LGA 1366 mobo or quad g34 mobo. Or, depending on the nature of this parallelism, it might be better to budget for some CUDA software development and a machine with a couple of GPUs.

Cards:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814162058&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Video+Cards-_-Galaxy-_-14162058

x3 = $360.

Motherboard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128495
$114

Power supply:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817152044
$144

CPU can be less than $50 if he really doesn't need the cpu to do much of anything.
So far I'm at $668. Probably have to buy a box to put it in for $50.
So now i'm at $718. What shall I buy with my $82?

Cards:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814162058&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Video+Cards-_-Galaxy-_-14162058

x3 = $360.

Motherboard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128495
$114

Power supply:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817152044
$144

CPU can be less than $50 if he really doesn't need the cpu to do much of anything.
So far I'm at $668. Probably have to buy a box to put it in for $50.
So now i'm at $718. What shall I buy with my $82?

Cards:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814162058&nm_mc=OTC-Froogle&cm_mmc=OTC-Froogle-_-Video+Cards-_-Galaxy-_-14162058

x3 = $360.

Motherboard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128495
$114

Power supply:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817152044
$144

CPU can be less than $50 if he really doesn't need the cpu to do much of anything.
So far I'm at $668. Probably have to buy a box to put it in for $50.
So now i'm at $718. What shall I buy with my $82?

I've been very happy with TomatoUSB on the E3000. Only $60 refurb, or $70 new from NewEgg ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833124419 ). Simultaneous 2.4/5GHZ g/n, USB port for NAS/Printer, 64MB RAM, gigabit switch.

I didn't know TomatoUSB supported simultaneous dual band.

If you're going to drop that much cash, why not just get a standard 1U Atom setup. Example: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16816101332

I've been very happy with TomatoUSB on the E3000. Only $60 refurb, or $70 new from NewEgg ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16833124419 ). Simultaneous 2.4/5GHZ g/n, USB port for NAS/Printer, 64MB RAM, gigabit switch. Only has 8MB flash though, if you were planning on storing lots of programs on it (you would want to put those on a USB flash drive anyway, so I don't think internal flash really matters)

By the way, here's the cheap ECC/4-drive bay box that I was talking about. For my setup, I would need to buy an external SATA dock to do my drive shuffle, but it's still an awesome looking box.

> I still can't fathom spending $300 on a video card....and feeling like I got a slammin deal in the process.

Did you miss the $300 Radeon 5970 on the NewEgg Black Friday sale too? =)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814103195

While I agree it's hard to justify that price point, that combination of THAT bang/buck is phenomenal !
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-3-graphics-performance,3063.html

Specifically ...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/battlefield-3-graphics-performance,3063-8.html

Keep in mind too... I was looking at one of these drives in a Newegg black friday sale, and the big thing about that 8GB of flash is that it is not MLC, it's SLC flash, which is significantly more expensive.

This one, for example:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148591

it still requires 2 drives in the machine. for laptops this is often not viable.

But the SSD doesn't have to be added as a discrete component. You can already get motherboards that incorporate a small SSD drive to be used with SRT.

Some of the netbook Atoms didn't a year or two back; isn't that still the case today?

As far as I can tell, the N270 (Diamondville series) was the last Atom that didn't support 64-bit. A quick Google search indicates that Intel hasn't officially discontinued it, but it seems to be almost impossible to find any new products that contain one. Newegg doesn't have any netbooks using this, though they do sell a 10-pack of Intel Atom N270 motherboards. Since they don't sell individual units, I assume these may be surplus stock (and probably intended for use in embedded systems). Even if the Diamondville series is not officially discontinued, it's definitely on its way out.

Errr, look into Opterons maybe? 12-core processors going 4-way are over a year old. Now you have 16-core processors, 4-way,

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819113038

So a 64-core box, if you are looking at math on x86. I can't find anything in similar price range on Intel side that offers 64-cores in a box, or even 32-cores in a box.

Of course, you could just be trolling and only actually want 1-thread performance anyway.

this solution. Though a bit pricey these days.

There is definatley gouging going on.

Here's a 3TB WD green caviar on a Japanese site

http://www.pocdesse.com/welcome.html?vo=ka&c1=99&c2=99&c3=99&id=4515479533301
~$180
Now here's the same drive on new egg.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136874&Tpk=WD30EZRX
~$249

I'm used to getting the hell gouged out of me for computer hardware in Japan. Graphics cards in particular are murderous, usually 20% higher over here than back in the US. When Japan is a good 25%+ cheaper, there's something very, very fishy going on.

If you had actually looked at newegg's black friday sale, you would know that you are wrong. http://promotions.newegg.com/neemail/nov-0-2011/BlackFridaymdbidsj25/index-landing.html#IT

Lol, I must be talking to a non-IT person here, which is rare on this site, but here you go dude, let me break it down for you.

1. you don't need a separate computer
2. you need something like http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16815100049 at under $100, if you can't / don't want to do HDMI divide that cost by 2 for analog connections. Notice the IN & the OUT connectors. Find free software, though I hear the paid stuff is much nicer, I wonder if VLC can do this? :)

Kind of, might have to play w it to do it direct, http://www.ehow.com/how_7162998_save-comcast-dvr-pc.html

Seriously the reason I DONT do this is cause i can watch netflix on any device anywhere, not so w the dvr unless I want to set up a media server kind of app which to me on the trade off is worth $8 a month, not $16 though.

$125, back in march and I'll have little reason to upgrade next year as well.. The whole build was less than a grand including the new case, PSU, monitor, 1055T X6, and 8GB ram only things I didn't replace were the keyboard and mouse. So about $80 a month so far, and it will probably be down around $40 when I upgrade again.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125341

Intel i5 661: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115217&Tpk=i5%20661
According to these benchmarks, we have:

• AMD Phenom II X4 965 4,291 $129.99*
• Intel Core i5 661 @ 3.33GHz 3,286 $175.66*

And this doesn't account for the money spent on a motherboard, which adds a hefty price to any intel offering.

So, looks like you botched your careful number check.

I much prefer this key.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820154032

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103960

see. even out of stock now.

Optical drives should be external. They cost $30.

For that price, you could throw one in your laptop bag, and plug it in when you need it.

http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=420&name=External-CD-DVD-Blu-Ray-Drives

I don't believe in built-in optical drives; I use them rarely. They're useless dead weight. Much prefer that the space they took, be replaced by more battery... which is always useful. Or leave both off and make the laptop lighter and slimmer.

Even then, I'd trust a cheap aluminum box over a static bag, any day. The laptop drives themselves are generally awfully stout these days when they're not spinning and the heads are parked, but there's occasionally some componentry on the back side which is best left undisturbed.

Not to mention ESD when handling the thing at its destination. I try to be careful about such things, but I don't expect my boss or the receptionist to be that way....and the less hands-on I have to be with backups, the happier I am.

Once seated inside a cheap, rigid, conductive box, with a USB interface to buffer electrical abuse, they're up for about any sort of normal/somewhat rough handling. We use cheesy boxes that are just like the one I linked, and while we've had a drive begin to fail over the past few years, the enclosures have all survived fine. Which is really pretty remarkable, I think, for the amount of money they don't cost.

NewEgg (and to some degree mWave) is the cheapest place to order all the computer parts you need to build your rig. Good selection, fast service, but what makes NewEgg stand out from all the others is 2 things:

a) You can see the 5 star break-down ratings from actual customers
b) You can not only see the total number of reviews, but sort products by "most reviews" AND read each and every mini summary from customers

i.e.
http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=22&name=AMD-Motherboards&Order=REVIEWS
We see that:

The "ASUS Crosshair IV Formula AM3 AMD 890FX SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX AMD Motherboard", has
avg. 4/5 eggs (stars)
485 customer reviews

Clicking on the eggs we see
5 eggs = 71% (285)
4 eggs = 15% (60)
Which means 86% think this is a great product. Translation: For a high-end AMD system, you can't go wrong with this product!

Before I order anything I _always_ see what is the most popular item AND read the reviews to see if there any issues other builders are having with it. Wouldn't you like to know BEFORE hand if the OEM drivers are buggy?

Buying a product with only 1 star means you are probably buying junk.

Their category organization for finding products is good too.

Hope this helps

For a NAS you could also get this one http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131732 it is cheaper than the Supermicro but only has one NIC.

$85 AMD E-350 APU+MOBO, MINI ITX

So it looks like AMD offers comparable solutions. Intel probably not.

I can't speak for VIA, I have an Intel Atom based bookshelf unit that runs http://xbmc.org/ on http://archlinux.org/ as a media center, remote controlled using the XBMC android app.

It plays full HD over HDMI (audio also through HDMI). I didn't run into any issues with installation. It also holds backups and serves as network storage. It's awesome.

Here's the link to the unit I have on newegg: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16856176008

"good, cheap, low-power Mini-ITX"
Do you want it to come with a pony? Good and cheap are usually mutually exclusive when it comes to new hardware.
Here is one with 6 SATA ports http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182233 but it is $199 and comes with two NICs which is great for servers.
Or you can get this one for only $139 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131732
Also six ports but only a single NIC and probably uses more power but is also faster.

"good, cheap, low-power Mini-ITX"
Do you want it to come with a pony? Good and cheap are usually mutually exclusive when it comes to new hardware.
Here is one with 6 SATA ports http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182233 but it is $199 and comes with two NICs which is great for servers.
Or you can get this one for only $139 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131732
Also six ports but only a single NIC and probably uses more power but is also faster.

Supermicro has a ATOM based board with 6 SATA ports. I am using one for a NAS box and it works good. Kind of expensive though.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813182234

Looks like similar has already been linked but I bought this one a year or two ago:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128452

I used to work at a company where we used Linux on our development desktops, and actually work at another company in the same boat today. At both places the boss had us try to use OpenOffice, AbiWord, etc., before finally admitting that despite them functionally doing everything we want, they're not compatible with Microsoft Office's formats and thus unusable.

Virtual machines work great though, and that was our solution to do word processing at both companies. You just have to buy a $250 retail copy of Windows and a $220 copy of Microsoft Office. Next install and setup your virtual machine software of choice with document shares (can be tricky). Now you can, amazingly, for only $470, read and write text documents that are compatible with other businesses.

By the way, isn't it cute how Newegg calls the category "Operating Systems" even though Windows is the only option?

I used to work at a company where we used Linux on our development desktops, and actually work at another company in the same boat today. At both places the boss had us try to use OpenOffice, AbiWord, etc., before finally admitting that despite them functionally doing everything we want, they're not compatible with Microsoft Office's formats and thus unusable.

Virtual machines work great though, and that was our solution to do word processing at both companies. You just have to buy a $250 retail copy of Windows and a $220 copy of Microsoft Office. Next install and setup your virtual machine software of choice with document shares (can be tricky). Now you can, amazingly, for only $470, read and write text documents that are compatible with other businesses.

By the way, isn't it cute how Newegg calls the category "Operating Systems" even though Windows is the only option?

I used to work at a company where we used Linux on our development desktops, and actually work at another company in the same boat today. At both places the boss had us try to use OpenOffice, AbiWord, etc., before finally admitting that despite them functionally doing everything we want, they're not compatible with Microsoft Office's formats and thus unusable.

Virtual machines work great though, and that was our solution to do word processing at both companies. You just have to buy a $250 retail copy of Windows and a $220 copy of Microsoft Office. Next install and setup your virtual machine software of choice with document shares (can be tricky). Now you can, amazingly, for only $470, read and write text documents that are compatible with other businesses.

By the way, isn't it cute how Newegg calls the category "Operating Systems" even though Windows is the only option?

Please provide a link to parts you recommend. Repeating this paragraph: HDMI-over-network-cable adapters I've seen are far, far more expensive than HDMI cable, require work that itself costs more than HDMI cable, and definitely don't meet the most recent specifications.

That is just one example of many. The on-topic issue is that, every time I've posted a comment or a bug report about the instability of Firefox, those who don't do extensive research and don't open many windows and tabs simultaneously say they don't experience the problem. So, I tried to give an example of the kind of research in which Firefox with extensions is extremely valuable. But, of course, there are millions of subjects that are researched.

Example of use of Firefox for research: The example I gave is just that, one example of millions of kinds of research that happen every day. Doing research often involves opening many windows and tabs until final decisions can be made. That causes Firefox to be unstable. If you don't like my example, choose one of your own.

HDMI: This is way off-topic, but apparently you are thinking of earlier HDMI specs. The HDMI 1.4b specification is for very high resolution video and Ethernet combined. All the HDMI-over-network-cable adapters I've seen are far, far more expensive than HDMI cable, require work that itself costs more than HDMI cable, and definitely don't meet the most recent specifications.

If you have an example of a network cable adapter for HDMI that meets the full specs, please provide a part number or link.

They are already doing this. They have TVs with built in apps and wireless. You can get Netflix, Hulu apps etc to stream content directly to your TV.
They are all doing this, check out anyone of these so called Smart TVs.