[mythtv-users] ATA RAID Question

Jarod C. Wilson jcw at wilsonet.com
Mon Mar 15 21:53:39 EST 2004


On Mar 15, 2004, at 18:07, Karl Rautenstrauch wrote:

> I am looking for a recommendation for an ATA RAID controller.  Anyone 
> have a pleasant experience with one they would like to share?

Most of them suck, unless you shell out lots of cash for a high-end 
one. The pseudo-RAID cards have really poor drivers, and do almost 
everything in software anyhow, so they hold very little benefit over 
getting a $30 Promise ATA card and using Linux software RAID, which 
actually does an extremely good job (and often out-performs those 
pseudo-RAID cards).

> Also, any opinions on whether this would make a difference in a system 
> with 512 MB of RAM and a PVR-250?

Not really. One card doesn't even come close to maxing out the 
throughput of a single ATA drive.

> In read/write intensive apps like Oracle OLTP databases, we see a huge 
> improvement with RAID 1 or RAID 1+0 and Myth seems fairly IO intense 
> while recording or buffering Live TV.  Thanks in advance.

You might see a decent gain switching your recordings partition to XFS, 
JFS or ReiserFS, if you happen to be using ext3 right now. I used to 
have a two-drive stripe in my system (for capacity, not performance) 
and see no difference between that setup and my current single-drive 
(WD 250GB/8MB cache) setup, with two simultaneous recordings in 
progress while playing back a 3rd stream.

-- 
Jarod C. Wilson, RHCE

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