For a couple years now I have been saving my DVD's and Blu-ray's onto my hard drives. Over the years this collections and obsession has grow ten-fold. A few months ago I came to the realization that my current HTPC case will soon be unable to hold all my hard drives. So i started looking for a HTPC case that could hold more drives, but what i soon realized was that they were all ugly, none were really worthy of being displayed in my living room, In addition to this the more hard drives I added to my HTPC the louder it became, which was a little annoying when trying to watch a movie.
I decided to create a media server, the media server will be out of sight in another room of the house, this will enable me to have an elegant looking HTPC in the living room and a big bulky server elsewhere behind closed doors, so who cares what it looks like. Now since that dilemma was solved, I was on to hunt for a slim HTPC. But I soon realized that was not an easy task.
If you search for "Slim HTPC" the first result is the GMC AVC-S7 its dimensions are 430x340x67mm (2.63in tall), sounds great right? Well good luck trying to find it, the case is nowhere to be found on any retail site. Why? 1st its was expensive, 2nd traditional motherboard, CPU and fans are not designed for low profile cases at least nothing under 5 inches. Next you will find other cases like the Thermaltake Mozart Sx Slim, Silverstone LC19B, SilverStone SST-ML02B-MXR, etc. They all have the same problem, trying to fit normal sized PC components into a small space just doesn't work easily.
Even a small ITX motherboard with an Intel Atom Processor is going to be 2.5 inches tall. But then you have severe performance issues and the inability to play streaming HD movies that utilize Microsoft's Silverlight technology (i.e. Netflix).
Where does that leave us? Either you have to use a big bulky case, an under powered Atom system, or do what I am going to do, butcher a laptop and stick it into an elegant wife approved case.
Hi. The Hiper HMC-1S53A is just over 2" and as far as I know still the smallest htpc case ever made. It's still possible to find them now and again on ebay. There's one on there at present but unfortunately already built. See it here and here's the hiper page. I actually have one at home but burnt out the psu which is why I was looking for laptop coverting.
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