[mythtv-users] RAID5 ATA IDE hardware card recommendations formythbackend machine

Dave Howorth Dave.Howorth at acm.org
Wed Dec 8 21:09:22 UTC 2004


Yan-Fa Li wrote:
<snip of lots of interesting stuff>
> As a side benefit there now are some interesting things you can do 
> related to performance.  This is an old trick streaming video guys
> used to use when disks had much lower performance.  Disk performance
> is related to how far you are from the spindle.
> 
> Think of each of the RAID sets as a zone, with Zone 1, being closest
> to the spindle and having a higher areal density  and Zone 4 the
> outer most part of the disk being the slowest.  If one wanted, one
> could use the different zones of the disk for different jobs.  For
> example, it would make sense to put TV buffering on the fastest part
> of the drive, so you could use Zone 1 for TV buffering.  Zone 4
> however is all about storage and one could use it for long term file
> or video storage, or even not at all if performance were critical.

Please excuse my ignorance, but I'm not sure what you mean by the inner 
parts having greater areal density. I thought that tracks near the 
outside of the disk had more sectors so that the lineal density was 
comparable to that on the inner portions of the disk. Wouldn't that also 
make the areal density comparable?

Thanks again for all the useful advice on building RAID arrays.
Dave


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