[mythtv] Re: New idea for storing recordings to disks

Joseph A. Caputo jcaputo1 at comcast.net
Wed Jun 29 17:54:00 UTC 2005


On Wednesday 29 June 2005 12:35, Hamish Moffatt wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 29, 2005 at 12:02:04PM -0400, Joseph A. Caputo wrote:
> > On Wednesday 29 June 2005 11:31, Robert Tsai wrote:
> > > Is your point that Myth should just not bother recording at all if 
> > > it 
> > > thinks it might run out of space?
> > 
> > Actually, my *original* original point was simply that having 
> > multiple  
> > storage locations would *not* really make it much more difficult 
> > (just  
> > a little bit) for Myth to determine whether there is enough space to 
> > start a recording or where to record it.  Perhaps I didn't do a good 
> > job of tying my original statements in to that conclusion... anyway, 
> > we've drifted a bit off-topic... 
> 
> But will the users understand that their recording died because one
> particular storage location filled up, even though the others still 
> had 
> space available?

...which is kind of why I put forth the idea of 'slicing' the recordings 
as they're in-progress (see my post earlier in this thread).  It allows 
you to take full advantage of *all* of the space across multiple mount 
points/devices, even though any one of them taken by itself may not 
have enough space.  Without the ability to treat a collection of 
storage devices as a single entity (a la RAID or LVM), multiple storage 
locations would tend to be rather complicated to present to the average 
user.  The difficulty with RAID and LVM (aside from initial setup) is 
in the various issues encountered when adding or removing a 
volume/device from the system (or when one fails).  The 'slicing' 
approach circumvents these issues by letting the *application* manage 
its own content in a filesystem-independent way.

Again, it's just an idea I had this morning... I'm not insisting that 
anyone start coding it -- actually, I'm quite satisfied with the 
current single-storage-dir approach, as I don't typically need more 
disk space than my current single TV recordings partition has.  Maybe I 
need to be recording more stuff...

-JAC


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