[mythtv-users] thoughts about 2 drives 1 video storage 1 system + other

[Ross Campbell]

On 1/25/06, Ryan Kremser <ryan.kremser at gmail.com> wrote:
> What is everyones thoughts when it comes down to partitioning drives.  I
> have a 200 gig hd right now but am looking to reformat and i'm considering
> putting the video storage only on the 200 gig drive where i'll then put the
> system and tv buffer on a second 20~30 gig drive.  Anyone see any benifits
> other than the increase in capacity?

So, with 0.19 I believe liveTV buffer area will be just more
recordings, so it won't be easily separable from recordings like it is
with 0.18.1 (Devs please flame if incorrect ;)

IMHO, the ideal solution would be to have a server with onboard
hardware RAID and 4 or more internal drives, create two ~40gb
partitions on top of RAID for OS - one for production use, one for
test/upgrade use, and then devote the rest of the RAID space to
recordings (except for an appropriately-sized Linux swap partition)

This would mean that any drive failure would never take out your OS or
recordings, you get the aggregate performance of all of your drives
for I/O, and you could boot to an alternate partition for upgrade
testing/new install testing or whatever else you want without trashing
your working mythtv install.

At least, this is what I'm thinking I'll do for my next backend...

Single drives are the cheapest solution, but they will all eventually
fail. I recently went through the process of trying to really
understand what the output of 'smartctl -a /dev/hdb' means - now I
know way too much about my drives and see messages every few days
about their diminishing health. :(

For anyone who doesn't know if their drives are monitored by smartd,
do the following:

smartctl -i /dev/hda (or hdb, sdb, etc.), then smartctl -a /dev/hda
you'll probably need to edit /etc/smartd.conf to enable it your drives
and you'll want to read the manpages - this link might be helpful:
http://www.linuxjournal.com/node/6983/print

-Ross