I already had LinuxMCE running a few months ago, but shelved it temporarily because I had some issues. I'm not in the process of putting it back in, and am looking for some advice or guidance on the hardware and layout I'm working with.
First, I've already built and installed the Core. I'm not opposed to re-doing it at this time if that should be required. I mostly built it as a test-bed for my hardware to assure it was all going to work and be stable, which it is. My Core is a PIII 1.4t with 512MB and a 40Gb drive. I have (2) 3com PCI 10/100 server NIC cards in it, and a USB 2.0/firewire 400 pci card for plug-n-play storage. This box is rock-solid stable and has been running for several days already. I do not intend to put my tuner card in this box, nor do any transcoding. This box is strictly intended to be the Core, and serve only those functions, so I think the modest hardware is doable. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Now, the first MD has some more power. It is a dual-cpu PIII 1.4 with 2GB and a 500GB IDE drive. It also has the PVR-500 for TV recording. (This
was my MythTV backend server and it worked very well) I would like this machine to perform all the heavy-lifting for MythTV and I would also like the internal drive to be available storage space for recordings. This part I'm not sure will work, so I need help here. It appears LMCE will not use the internal drive for storage if I net-boot it. Any way around this? What if I move the drive to the Core as a 2nd drive? I'm open to ideas here, obviously the 40GB drive the core runs on is not going to cut it!

And last, I am concerned about LMCE spreading my stuff out all over the network. It detects network shares (very nice) and asks if it can use them. I'm hesitant to allow it for a couple reasons. First, will LMCE use up too much available space and fill up the hard drive of a Windows box? And second, if my stuff is spread out all over the network, what happens if one drive fails? Or maybe even more common what if that Windows box is turned off? Do I lose data or corrupt files? How can I safely backup my media if it is spread out across 4 or 5 network shares?
Thanks in advance for your assitance.
BTW all my TV recording is Standard Def, and will remain so for the foreseeable future.