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Play .MKV’s in Windows Media Center (WMC)

Play .MKV’s in Windows Media Center (WMC)

For a long time I had resisted converting my DVD and Blu-Ray disks into any other format because I didn’t want to lose any quality.  I had lived by this rule for a long time, and thankfully companies like QNAP and Thecus came to my storage rescue.  However, the day has come where the cost of storing all the extra garbage that comes along with these movies has opened my eyes to benefits conversions.  With that, I have began converting my movie collection to a format that allows me to lose all the excess fat, but keep my movie loss-less. Read More…

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The rear end of the unit is nothing special; just your standard connections: the SATA connections, power connections, a power switch, an 80mm cooling fan and some jumpers for HDD activity.  Luckily, the included 80mm fan does an adequate job of cooling your drives while producing little to no noise at all. The BPU-340SATA and the BPU-340SAS differ in that the 340SATA can use a couple of standard 4 pin molex connectors instead of only serial ATA power connectors.  This allows some users with older power supplies to take advantage of these devices without using adapters.

The backplane produced by iStarUSA allows me to install 4 drives, using only 3 5.25" bays, and having easy access to them. Outside of the useless locking system and the power buttons this unit is nice.  After my initial experience with the broken latching mechanism I wanted to use the unit for a while before publishing this article.  I can say with confidence that there have been no issues with the unit since the initial incident.  For your confidence, I removed the drives twice a day to see if there were any other dependability issues.

In my experiences with iStarUSA, they live up to their word.  A friend of mine purchased a tower chassis from them based on one of our reviews and had an issue with the hinge on the front bezzel; they shipped him a new hinge without any struggles.  That to me is worth its weight in gold.  Would I buy one? Absolutely... not just for the product, but because iStarUSA stands behind their products.

Places to Buy: (I don't endorse ANY retailer)

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Joe DiFiglia has written 226 Articles at C.O.D.


In early 2000 I became increasingly frustrated with hardware review sites praising less than satisfactory products. The saying: “if you want something done right, do it yourself” applies here. I wasn’t satisfied, so I did it myself; and here we are years later.