[mythtv-users] Need advice for storage project

[Richard Mixon (qwest)]

mythtv-users-bounces at mythtv.org <> wrote:
> I've got two projects for the week - building my Myth TV box (Pundit
> Frontend/Backend) and building a 320gb 1394a firewire drive enclosure
> out of an old SCSI multibay case.
>
> I'd like to get the storage box set up before the mythTV box, so that
> I can do some file transfer and free up the 80gb disk that I am going
> to use in the Pundit. Basically, I need to decide how to set up the
> storage before really playing around much in Myth. I plan to use the
> storage for video and audio, but (if possible) use the drive actually
> in the Myth box for recording live TV. Basically, I'll move files over
> once they're reencoded to MPEG4.
>
> Anyway, I'll have three PCs in my apartment, 2 of them Windows PCs.
> (they have to be running windows, one for games and one because its a
> work laptop, so please don't tell me I should switch to Linux on
> those. I can't) Anyway, I need to be able to connect to the storage
> from all three. I'm not connecting the storage bay to the laptop,
> obviously.
>
> The way I see it, I need to decide A) which PC to connect the storage
> bay to and B) which filesystem to use. My original plan was to connect
> to my main windows PC and use NTFS, then share the drive via Samba. Is
> this a bad idea for any reason? Will myth have problems using NTFS or
> a shared drive efficiently?
>
> Also, I'd rather not use a RAID-0 array for the 2 160gb drives in the
> box. Is there a way either to have Myth use both drives for storage or
> to span the drives in software so that they appear as one drive to
> myth?
>
> Thanks...

I do not know how the NTFS share using Samba will work.

But on the 2 160GB drives...
First, I assume the data is not that valuable as you are not considering
RAID1 (mirroring).
Two, you can use Logical Volume Manager to easily combine the two drives
into one volume. In brief:
1) You create the correct LVM partition type on each drive, occupying
all of its space.
2) You use the LVM utilities (not sure which distro you are on, SuSE has
a really nice interface for doing this) to carve up the space into as
many or as few (i.e. "one") volumes as you wish.

If later you run out of space, you can add another hard drive or two to
the volume group and allocate them the new space to your existing
logical volume.

Hope this helps - Richard