My interests include low power HTPCs: if the system would run without a spinning HDD (either boot from IDE Flash Drive or USB stick) that would significantly reduce power consumption (and heat). That being said, this memory is $$$ and one would still want a HDD for movie storage.

Is there a way (support for) idling a spinning HDD when the system is idle? or is this idea just not possible for some reason or another?

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R7.3: 0.22.20091023-1, Hauppauge PVR-500 (Philips FQ1236A MK4), Gigabyte Gigabyte EG45M-UD2H, E5200 2.4Ghz, 2GB RAM, NVIDIA GEFORCE 256MB

Booting from a flash drive might make sense for a dedicated frontend (think "display server"). You can also boot off a LAN connection if your bios supports it.

I've read that some people have had support with low power Via processers, and other's have taken high-end processors and under-clocked them to bring down power usage.

If the box is going to have a HDD, I know I've read that you can set it up the system to "wake itself up" to do a recording. Your PC can then be turned off when you're not using it. Again I think you need bios support for this.

I don't know about idling the hard drive. But the nature of this system requires mass storage AND lots of read/writes. Remember there's a lot of SQL and log writing going on. At this time that means having a hard drive on, at least somewhere, when you're doing almost anything with mythtv .

Mogator88, good idea. I could limit the scope to a front end device to be a player only: it could have an extremely small form factor. If it were to boot from a flash disk, this front end would really become more of an appliance.

I hope that other senior members of the forum will comment.

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R7.3: 0.22.20091023-1, Hauppauge PVR-500 (Philips FQ1236A MK4), Gigabyte Gigabyte EG45M-UD2H, E5200 2.4Ghz, 2GB RAM, NVIDIA GEFORCE 256MB

This has been discussed before. I thought about building a Via system myself. Do a search here on Via and mini-itx and you'll learn all about it.

Regarding the flash drive, if this is a dedicated myth machine I'd try booting off the network before a flash drive. The flash drive is another layer of expense and complication. They're not designed for the heavy r/w activity of sql, paging and log files, so you're dealing with network "issues" anyways. A USB stick hanging off a case is rather flimsy and accident prone, too.

You could probably use a laptop hard drive with the Via processor, and get a full featured lower power computer. Or you could buy a used MediaMVP and get a good bit of the mythtv functionality in a low power diskless device.