DAT Build Doh! PC Build for Archival Digitization

it's almost the holiday season and something that comes up a lot is what do we do with our old home movies you know you find an old home movie on on eight millimeter that grandpa shot in the 1970s how do you preserve it how do you bring it into the computer what do you use to preserve it well i get a special project this machine is going to be built for mainly old school digital audio tape conversion but i'm going to show you how it'll work for bringing in old vhs tapes or old reel to reel tapes or old audio analog digital you name it we can do it let's do it [Music] our digital media preservation is extremely important if you were burning cds in the 90s and early 2000s chances are those cds are already unreadable did you use you know gold foil archival quality okay maybe if you really want to preserve that cd that you burned uh with your music mix you're going to want to transfer that to something a little bit more permanent or play the uh media change shuffle square dance about every five to ten years now that that was really cool digital audio tape the problem is that that is degrading rapidly audio collection if you've got dats it's 20 to 40 years old it may already not be readable and you want to preserve as much information as possible some dat decks actually have digital out a sony proprietary protocol and also spdif so we're going to build a compact media ingest workstation that will be great for bringing in home movies old audio cassettes old recordings from the radio whatever you need in terms of preservation and hey if you do have some stuff that's like old radio recordings or old tv or whatever you know you can upload that to archive.org it's pretty good stuff and you should because why not pretty much all this stuff came from newegg first off is the ryzen 5700g this is overkill for media ingest system but it's got a built-in igpu which is powerful enough if we're talking about transcoding 720p or 480p signals or less depending on what kind of video we're doing and certainly this is plenty for audio i've got a western digital 10 terabyte wd red ultimately we're going to store information on a nas something like a synology we'll talk a little bit more about that toward the end of the video i've got a startech.com 7.1 channel audio solution we'll talk about why this specific one in just a minute i've got oloy blade ddr4 performance memory yeah i know ddr5 just launched and there's some options there but this is a low-cost no-nonsense build that's also really pretty extremely powerful for the motherboard i've elected for the colorful b550m i reviewed this motherboard separately that's in another video a while ago this motherboard will run all the way up to the ryzen 5950x let's not oversell it it's just a great low cost board it's really what we're talking about here for the case this is the in-wind long beach it's a desktop case it also comes with a compact 300 watt power supply 300 watts for our bloody little 5700g that's plenty this is a system that can be used in a desktop configuration horizontally like this or vertically like that and if you take a look at the front panel you'll see that we have a five and a quarter inch drive bay right here you can use those obsolete things called cd-roms actually because this is going to be used for media archive including cdrs i'm shopping around for new old stock tiac cdrs tech was the cadillac of cd burners they were designed with the commercial versions were designed to be able to process 10 000 plus cdr disks if you can find a new old stock one of those they're great for cd burning they're fast reliable accurate and designed for mass production if anything can read a damaged cd it's going to be one of those tx cdrs the biggest drawback with this case and the reason why i only hesitantly recommend it is because it doesn't support full height expansion cards so this expansion card this is a pci express carrier that has two octane disks on it it's got a pci express by eight connection this is a full height card meaning that it's full height it's this tall there is a variant of this that are half height carts that are half as tall so if we look at our our sound card this sound card is a half height sound card but it has a full height bracket not to worry in the box we actually have two half height brackets now this particular sound card has optical in and optical out both spdif and it further has this little breakout connector that has a bunch of analog connections on it so you can really rock something special that'll work great in this case you can see what i did there in this case in this case literally in this case now the bad thing is pretty much no gpu exists that isn't a crappy gpu that is half height so if we ever wanted to add a discrete gpu to the system we're basically out of luck first in the power supply count this power supply is a tiny power supply smaller than sfx 300 watts and we might be able to find a 450 forget it it's going to be easier to transplant these parts into a larger case than it is to struggle with the small size of this fortunately cases are cheap and literally every component in here we could transplant into another 50 case if we get our back to a wall we'll have to get a power supply and then we can reuse all the components and we'll save the full height brackets so we can use the full height brackets with a full height case or cases that support full height expansion cards at some point in the future but for now this form factor at the bottom of a stack of equipment for processing audio and bringing things in along with our cdr drive here in the front it's going to work out great as an archival medium now i think if you're picking out a motherboard definitely look for a motherboard that's got displayport out this one has dvi and hdmi and it would be nice to have displayport but hey hdmi will get the job done now everyone has done a good job with the internal case layout on this system because i've got room for two and a half inch drives here a single three and a half inch drive the five and a quarter inch drive and then motherboard stuff and all the accoutrement my front panel connection is uh two usb 3 ports and two usb 2 ports headphone and microphone there's also an optional usbc kit that you can get and the expansion board will just slide right in here to the front so in-wind's basically thought of everything i also like that it's kind of toolless we will begin by inserting our 10 terabyte mechanical hard drive in win and their brilliance look it's done toollessly look that 10 terabyte hard drive it's not going anywhere inwin is a good brand now i know what you're thinking he's only talking about a mechanical hard drive so far what about storage well could go with a two and a half inch ssd that would be a good idea for a build like this especially if that would save a few bucks but i've got some keoxia storage this is a 500 gig keoksia m.2 they're a good brand koxia sells more in the commercial space and to oems but they're extremely reliable they have a really high right endurance which makes it perfect for this use case because we'll bring the media in to flash do some munging on it put it on the mechanical hard drive and eventually a copy of it will make its way to the network storage the colorful is probably an interesting choice but it's got a 7.1 built-in sound card solution let's get reasonably okay built-in nick and we've got a pretty good selection of usb ports on the back and available on the edge connectors usb 2 and 3 it's perfect for a front panel connection if i had one complaint it's the lack of a display port out on this particular b550 motherboard but hey it was inexpensive another consideration of the in-wind case is the height for the cpu cooler it's not a lot not a lot there be sure to check the specs of your cpu cooler to make sure it'll be fine this is a 65 watt cpu tdp 65 watt tdp it's going to use a little more power than that the board is going to heat up as well but it doesn't even get warm there's no top vent in the in wind case either so i think going with a lower profile cooler like this probably a good idea if i had a second choice it would probably be something from scythe one of their downdraft coolers would work really well in this setup definitely don't do this if you don't have a practice hand or drill with a clutch or both the thermal paste is pre-installed when installing a cpu cooler you only want to turn it down two or three turns in each corner until it grabs because the amount of torque in each corner should be identical save your screws and connectors you never know where you're going to switch cpu coolers and it might be a different mounting style now colorful made some colorful choices on this motherboard like the cpu fan header right there right above the primary x16 slot we can also go ahead and install our oloy memory this is 32 gigs two 16 gigs ticks 3200 cl 16. it's pretty good stuff one of the m.2 has a heatsink the other one doesn't we're getting mounted in the one with the heatsink i'm using a double zero phillips screwdriver with our m.2 mounted and our memory and our processor and our cooler it's time to put it all in the case step one i o shield so with the i o shield don't forget to bend these little things out of the way because there are versions of this motherboard that don't have built-in lan or that don't have the usb connector i guess but this helps also ground it if you can bend it so that it still touches the metal case perfecto now this case already has built-in standoffs so we don't have to do anything to mess with the standoffs the optional standoffs are removable so if your micro atx motherboard doesn't have a standoff you can actually remove it from the two in this case that are optional another nice little feature of the in-wind is the removable standoffs will also grab onto the motherboard when you get them in exactly the right place so the motherboard will kind of like click down the way that it's supposed to be oh no we've run into our first problem with the build the four sata headers are kind of blocked by the physical mounting thing for the mechanical hard drive that's okay we can use right angle sata cables so these cables come out at an angle rather than straight out but you have to plug them in before you mount the motherboard so i get to check these things before you actually get into it so i've plugged the drive connector into sata ii as you can see here on the front and i'm just gonna turn this thing at a right angle i'm actually gonna route the cable kind of under the motherboard be careful while you do this you do not want to scrape the bottom of the motherboard you might cut a trace on the bottom of the motherboard scratches can be fatal now the power supply that comes with the in-win has three modern sata connectors on two cables and one molex connector so it's modern state of modern sata old-school molex and modern sata on two different power cables and there we are we've basically got the build complete the only thing that was really a little different is the front panel audio connection is not actually going to connect to the motherboard it's going to connect to that add-in sound card we're going to disable the onboard audio on this motherboard turns out the onboard audio didn't really matter now pretty much the only reason we needed the other sound card is for some software and because it has an optical spdif input it turns out that that standard kind of can reach back into the 1980s especially when you have an optical to coax digital converter it's actually originally a sony protocol and then spdif sort of uh became another variant later the sony protocol had problems with the lower bitrate that'll have to be the subject of another video i still have to add the teac cd-rom in here but that won't be any big deal i've pre-routed my sata cable both power and uh data but you could not plug in four-sided devices into this motherboard if you tried so it's a good thing that i opted for the m.2 for primary storage because i couldn't have physically fit a sata ssd in here because of the right angle connectors with this particular motherboard now another option you might be tempted by is to use a usb audio dac or something like that that absolutely can work and usb audio docs are great but for archival and digitization and things like that i don't 100 trust usb especially over you know it's like i've got eight hours of audio tape here i'm just gonna let it record and come back to it will everything actually be working correctly i don't trust usb for that i just just don't now in terms of software i yeah windows 11 but it's going to be easy for the archivists to use linux has a lot of great utilities for archiving but ultimately other people are going to be doing the actual archiving so hey windows 11 it is there's different software that i plan to use and i do actually probably plan to use a usb video capture something like a dazzle you know usb dazzle it's composite input get those on ebay for like 10 bucks that's great for capturing vhs video from old camcorders or vcrs or whatever for the software part of this and what we're going to get into with the digital audio tapes and some of the other stuff that's going to have to be in a follow-up video or more likely a post on the level 1 forum with some photos and video be sure to check that out i'm wendell this is level one i'm signing out you can find me in the level one forums [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Level1Techs

Views: 7,243

Keywords: technology, science, design, ux, computers, hardware, software, programming, level1, l1, level one

Id: 9SMslDIyc4w

Length: 14min 37sec (877 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2021