[mythtv-users] Allowing hard drive to spin down in .19 with live tv

[Greg Farrell]

Hi,

   I'm using .18 and it's great. However I wanted to do some work
to get the hard-drive to spin down and stay down unless I was recording
a show. This is because it's a mini-itx pc in a very small case so the
hard-drive is the loudest part of it and also probably the hottest (3
1/2 inch hd).

The plan was to use a 512mb ram disk as my live tv ring buffer, so that
while watching tv the hard drive could spin down without causing
problems. Either that or a usb flash key with jffs (to remove
file-system hot-spots).

With the removal of the live tv buffer in .19 can anyone give me some
suggestions on how I can still watch live tv with the hard drive spun
down? I really don't want a second backend system elsewhere.

The only thing I can think of is trying to use a journaling file-system
and see if I can up the commit interval to something huge like 500megs.
I don't know if this is possible, and unfortunately I can't find any
commit interval documentation for jfs which is what my media partition
is configured with.

If another fs could support this I'd be willing to do a backup and
format.

I really want to get rid of what noise there is from the hard drive
where possible. It breaks the illusion of a cool little media device as
it sounds like a pc.

  thanks a lot,
     Greg