[mythtv-users] Laptop Harddrive speed, capacity

[Bob]

Steve Adeff wrote:
> On Thursday 10 November 2005 10:08, Brandon Sherman wrote:
>>Hullo,
>>
>>In my continuing plot to create a MythTV box out of an old laptop, I
>>am now eyeing the hard drive.  It is a standard 2.5" drive of unknown
>>speed (I'd guess 5400, no more) and 40GB of space.  I'm looking at
>>one of these: http://oss.wischip.com/  Which can give me MPEG-2,
>>MPEG-4, and DivX.
>>Do I need to get another hard drive?  The PlextorX will be connecting
>>through a USB 2.0 PCMCIA card, and I'm not sure if a USB 2.0 hard
>>disk would be good because of the bus bottleneck issue.
>>
>>There  is a 4-pin FireWire port on the computer, but nothing I've
>>seen uses it (aside from cameras).
>>
>>Any suggestions on the drive?
>>
>>Thanks,
>>Brandon
> 
> Brandon, this sounds like a job for hdparm!
> as root run hdparm -I /dev/hd?
> replace ? with the drive letter, ie 'hdparm -I /dev/hda'
> this will give you a bunch of information on your drive, under the heading 
> Capabilities look at the DMA level, it will have an * next to the mode its 
> set in, and in theory will only show the DMA levels supported. 
> ie.
> DMA: mdma0 mdma1 mdma2 udma0 udma1 udma2 udma3 udma4 *udma5
> so for instance, this drive is currently set to udma5 (ATA133). I'll assume 
> the distro you are using will automatically set the highest level of udma 
> support, if not do some googling and use 'man hdparm' and you'll figure out 
> how to get it to switch and stay at that level.
> 
> now, the REAL information will come from using the 
>  -t   perform device read timings
>  -T   perform cache read timings
> options in hdparm. the important one is '-t' as it will give you a reasonable 
> idea as to the max speed the drive can actually write data. 
> you'll get an output similar to:
> # hdparm -t /dev/hda
> 
> /dev/hda:
>  Timing buffered disk reads:   70 MB in  3.05 seconds =  22.95 MB/sec
> which is the output from my laptop drive. Write speeds are usually slightly 
> faster in buffered writes (~10%) and slightly slower in random writes (~20%).
> 
> Don't forget that you'll want to add some overhead considering its both your 
> OS drive and your storage drive.
> 
> I think the best advice would be to get an external USB2.0 hard drive, you'll 
> get the extra space and not have to worry about drive speed issues and you'll 
> get some extra space for storing recordings.
> 
> Steve

This is all great advice except I'd get a multi format external hard 
drive (USB2 + Firewire, soon you should be able to get external SATA as 
well), I've got one, the case is called "Smart drive" and it's small 
sexy and aluminium (read good cooling) and I've put a 100Gb Hitachi 
Laptop drive in, a cool thing about that is that it can usually get 
enough power from the USB not to require the provided power supply or 
the use of the funky cable they provide that takes a power boost from a 
second USB port (interestingly the only USB port I've found that doesn't 
provide enough juice is my powered USB2 hub).

The Firewire port on your laptop will be a 4 pin un-powered port (as 
opposed to the 6pin powered variety) so any external hard drive using it 
will need a power supply, if you're not going to move it around then 
there's no point getting a laptop drive and paying the portable premium, 
instead, assemble it your self, get a mettle external USB2 & 1394 
en-closer that boasts about being cool and quiet and a big PC hard drive.

/. covered this recently
http://ask.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/10/11/2116240

Good luck.


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