[mythtv-users] Experience with external (firewire or usb) hard drives?

Joseph A. Caputo jcaputo1 at comcast.net
Mon Aug 2 14:05:28 EDT 2004


On Monday 02 August 2004 13:18, Nathan Richardson wrote:
> How much success has userland had with using external hard drives
> with Myth? I'm planning on using a fast internal drive for the
> live-tv buffer and an external Firewire box for storage of recordings
> and encoding.
>
> Anyone have any idea if this will work without recording or playback
> errors? I also plan to access the firewire drives from another PC (it
> will be used as general audio/video/data storage for my whole
> apartment), but nothing else should be playing or recording video to
> it. The drives in the firewire case are decently fast - 2 160gb
> Maxtor 7200 RPM 8mb cache drives.
>
> There is at least one thread in this list that mentions problems with
> a firewire drive, but the problems mentioned there seem to have to do
> with livetv playback. Has anyone had experience with using firewire
> for recordings?
>
> If not, do you have a random guess / back-of-envelope calculation for
> whether this would work acceptably well?

I have an external FireWire/USB enclosure (using the FW connection, not 
USB) with a 120GB 7200RPM WD drive in it.  I don't use it for Myth 
recordings or LiveTV, but I do use it for MythVideo rips & my MythMusic 
collection.  I'd image you'd have similar performance issues playing 
back Myth recordings as with playing back MPEG-4 .avi files (unless 
you're recording in MPEG-2, in which case the throughput requirements 
would be greater).  I've had no problems with performance.

-JAC


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