[mythtv] Preemptive Disk Writes

[Eric M. Reischer]

Just a thought I had after setting up my mythbox (package is awesome by
the way).  Since I have a brand new 120 GB disk and I want it to last
awhile, I set up noflushd to spin down the disk after an hour of
inactivity.  I've noticed, however, that my programs tend to start
recording a few seconds late and I believe it's because the backend starts
writing to disk (not my primary drive, mind you) immediately upon the
start of the recording period, but it takes the disk 5 or 10 seconds to
spin up and become online for writes.  I know that usually file buffers
make up for this, but given the data rate that MPEG streams are captured
at I fear the buffers may be getting a bit big by the time the disk spins
up.

My suggestion is that perhaps a minute or so before a scheduled recording
is to begin, the backend perhaps does a touch on the output file so as to
trigger any APM daemons to wake up the destination disk before the actual
recording begins.
My apologies if this issue has already been brought up.

Cheers,
E