[mythtv-users] OT Hardware RAID 5 Recommendations

Blammo blammo.doh at gmail.com
Tue Dec 12 19:39:15 UTC 2006


On 12/12/06, George Galt <george.galt at gmail.com> wrote:
> Not particularly.  I had assumed that it would overload the chip (an
> old Athlon XP 2000), especially if this same system is being used as a
> mythbackend (and Slimserver, and a few other things).

I made the journey from single disk, to raid0 to SW Raid5 to HW Raid5,
and wish I'd skipped all the inbetween steps.

The challenge I ran into was IO contention when doing SW Raid. When
each controller (IDE or SATA), plus ethernet, video, and capture cards
are all asking for IRQ's, things tended to get dropped/ugly under
heavy load. In addition to the fact that all that IO is CPU switched,
and contending across a PCI bus.  Moving to HW Raid5 dropped the load
from 80% under heavy load to 10-15%, and all my stability issues went
away. Search the Archives for problems others have had with NFS /
SWRaid / XFS/JFS and system stability, including my own.

I own (2) 3ware cards now, and they are easily the best money I ever
spent on myth.

FWIW,  if you are single tuner, single box, non-HD OTA, you have a
greater chance of avoiding these issues. Grow to HD, dedicated
frontend/backend, commercial flagger, and you start running into these
issues.


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