[mythtv-users] Adding a hard drive, LVM or RAID0

Brad Templeton brad+myth at templetons.com
Thu May 19 20:05:36 UTC 2005


On Thu, May 19, 2005 at 01:19:25PM -0600, mark at onnow.net wrote:
> xfs is a good choice.  It is also easy to grow and handles large files ( video )
> quite well.
> 

Yes, but xfs can't shrink.   Why would you want to shrink?

There are times when you get a sudden surge of demand for disk space.
For example, you may go away on a trip or for other reaons not be
watching any TV but still recording it.   You might encounter
"sweeps month" where a ton of different programs are all on at
once and you want to catch them and watch them more slowly.   During
the opening of the fall season, you might like the opportunity
to record every new pilot you can, and wait for buzz and watch
the ones that turn out to be interesting.

And then return to normal disk patterns.  In particular, you might
want to temporarily add a USB disk drive to your system to store the
extra shows, then remove it later when the big load is in place.

For this, you want a filesystem you can grow, and shrink back.  xfs
thus is not the right choice.   reiser or ext3 can handle it.  jfs also
can't.

Thus at this point I recommend Reiser.

Of course even better will be if somebody gets around to coding myth
to handle video storage on multiple filesystems.

lvm is your obvious choice here.  lvm includes the ability to grow and
shrink, and to add disks and later remove them (though the latter
can be slow to do.)


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