[mythtv-users] OT: Firewire HDD

[Andrew Dodd]

Quoting Paul Woodward <paul_woodward at fastnet.co.uk>:

> Just a word of warning - I heard somewhere about Linux being very bad with
> firewire HDs and simultanious reads/writes. Hopefully one of the gurus on
> this list can shed some light...
That probably would have been right here on this list from me.

I got lots of "prebuffering pause" errors with Live TV or viewing anything while
a recording was occuring when I was using an external 1394 drive, although there
were additional factors:

a)  The drive was FAT32.  I've seen one or two places that said "don't use FAT32
on external 1394 drives under Linux" - I don't know if there was a specific
performance problem, or if the guy was just saying that FAT32 sucked.  All I
know is that its performance under Linux was not as good or reliable as it was
under Windows.

b)  I was running a 2.4 kernel.  2.6 might have faster/more robust SBP2 support.