[mythtv-users] Multiple directories for MythTV recordings?

[Daniel Quinlan]

Quoting "Allen T. Gilliland IV" <alleng4 at yahoo.com>:

> I am also of the opinion that it would be nice to
> support multiple record directories.  I'm not even
> thinking about doing anything fancy with nfs or other
> backends ... I just want to be able to add more HDD's
> to my current backend as easily as possible.

this is where LVM can be useful (as long as you don't want redundancy)
my backend has a 30Gb drive and I'm going to join it with a 40Gb i've liberated
from another machine.

you can also shrink/grow LVM logical volumes (think partitions).
we use this at work, kickstart a machine with a default LVM setup and then grow
/var/log if it's a log server or grow /var/spool if it's a mail server etc etc

> I have an 80 gig drive setup with all my recordings
> and system setup on it ... now what if i want to add
> another drive for more recording storage?  I have
> never really messed with raid, but from my
> understanding you wouldn't be able to raid 2 drives
> once 1 is already full of data.

you could mirror it but that's probably not the raid level you were after =]

you're kinda stuck AFAIK, unless you can backup the first 80Gb drive somewhere
else.  this is why I used LVM from the start, knew I'd need more space

you can expand an existing software raid array using raidreconf
http://unthought.net/raidreconf/index.shtml

there's been several success reports on the linux-raid mailing list but it's
still classed as experimental 

> This just seems like a feature that would be well
> worth supporting.

it's possible using software outside of MythTV, so i guess it won't be too high
priority.  

how do Tivo/ReplayTV et al handle multiple disks?


-- 
Daniel Quinlan