Hardware

I spent a long time looking at hardware while waiting for the TV I wanted to be available (a Samsung UN55C6800) and for the Ceton CableCARD tuner to be as well. Many recommendations say you don't need much of a PC for MC. Ahh, but if you are going to record 5 HD shows at once, scan two at a time for commercials, and watch another, an i7 with 9GB of memory and big disk is not too much. Spend as much as you can afford.

I ended up with an HP Pavilion Elite 180t which had a good price and lots of positive reviews. The only thing not great about it is the fans are a bit noisy when it is doing a lot of work. It probably needs more ventilation in the stereo cabinet in which it lives.

Disks

The Hitachi Deskstar that came with my HP Pavilion 180t is fine. I added a 2TB WD Caviar Green was working fine in my office workstation, so I bought one for tihs. Bad idea; it is not fast enough to record more than a couple HD shows at a time AND scan other recordings for commercials AND watch a show. Playback breaks up. Now I record everything to the Hitachi and move old things to the WD. No problems with that setup. Vacuum vents and fans once in a while.

2011.10.22: add a Vantec NexStar 3 NST-360SU-BL external eSATA enclosure for a third disk, and old 500GB Hitachi. Works well, move recordings I don't really care about; write speed about 50MB/s.

Memory

The 9GB of memory in the 180t is not too much. 8 would have been ok, but HP had a special one week with 1GB free.

Processor

The quad-core i7 930 at 2.8Gz is not overkill. It is often very busy.