[mythtv] Preemptive Disk Writes

[Kevin Kuphal]

Eric M. Reischer wrote:

>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.
>  
>
You could also set a global 30 second start ahead time in the General TV 
options in Setup and your recordings, if it is not already recording, 
will start 30 seconds earlier giving your disks enough time to spin up.  
You could set this as low as you need to in order to exacly compensate 
for your spin up time

Kevin