Been looking at micro ITX systems.

Does anyone know what modern computer gear is like at withstanding NVH say eg in a car?? Would be protected from damp and dirt in a casing but needs to be capable of remaining functional under driving conditions. inc hard drive obviously!!

Ive an idea of using a Micro ITX system powering a pci DVR card to record 4 cameras in motion.

Now i dont fancy paying thousands for those custom trackday systems!!

I can get cameras cheap enough as can DVR cards and micro ITX systems, but will they handle the environment??

 

Any system should be fine under driving conditions, its the hard drive that can't take the vibrations, but an easy way round that is to use a solid state drive.

It'll need to be well ventilated as well or it'll cook

 

how big can you get on solid state drives these days??

would the heat shrink style finned car cases be adequate for cooling?

 

erm, as theyre still very new technology theyre quite expensive, you can get 250+ gig ones but theyre very very pricy.

but unless your wanting to film in hd i can't see why you'd need a massive hard drive.

As for heat, it all depends, alot of the newer chips run very cool to the point where you can cool them passively but saying that, cars can get very hot!

 

most of what ive seen seems to be fanless. So id imagine a small in casing fan on a so called fanless unit would ensure coolness.

 

just seen 64gb drives for £140. not too bad. Im sure that could hold the OS, software and plenty of video.

 

my company do incar pc's, we do double din all in one or boot mount to your chioce of screen. Not trying to plug my company just help we use Hitachi TravelStar 2.5in sata hard drives and have done since 2004, as they have excellent shook resistance. Not had one fail yet
(touchs wood) so i'd recommend them. I'd also recomend the atom processor as a minimum on the micro-mini boards if you want to do the recording, had these running 3d cad in some testing.

 

XP with some basic software only takes a couple of gigs, so a 64gb ssd would do you fine for a few films/music or about a week or PVR output @ QVGA.

Chris