[mythtv-users] Backend hardware advice

[Sage]

Can't help you with UK suppliers, but I can tell you that there isn't
a terribly huge difference between SATA and PATA on the consumer
level.

SATA's got a higher burst transfer, but that translates to very little
real world performance gain on 7200rpm disks.  So the advantages to
SATA are mainly limited to three points:

1. Cables are smaller, so you can get slightly better airflow in small
enclosures.
2. SATA drives tend to come with double the cache; often times an IDE
drive with an 8 MB cache is available in SATA with a 16 MB cache --
there is often a small performance increase in this, but it is likely
negligible for your needs.
3. The one substantial benefit of SATA is that SATA disks don't share
bandwidth with other SATA devices.  On a PATA interface, if you have
two devices (one master, one slave) daisy-chained to a single
interface, then only one of those devices can talk at a time; that
slows the whole chain down.  SATA avoids the master/slave
configuration entirely.  If you only have one hard drive and one CD
drive, then it usually doesn't matter, since you can dedicate a PATA
port to each, but if you have more than 2 devices, you can benefit
from SATA.

If you're planning on going with hardware RAID, then benefit 3 is
likely negligible to you as well, since any hardware RAID card worth
its salt will provide you with a dedicated port for each disk.  But
you'll find that the RAID cards for large PATA disk arrays are very
large themselves, often requiring full-length PCI slots.   SATA raid
cards are usually substantially smaller.

I'm curious as to why you're wanting hardware RAID if you want to do
this on the cheap.  I'm assuming you're considering RAID 5, and a
hardware RAID card can be worthwhile in that situation, but when it
comes to cheap and stable, software RAID is an effective solution.

On 7/8/06, Paul Simpson <paul at maggiandpaul.dnsalias.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Like a lot of people, I'm looking at putting together a Myth system for as
> little cash as possible!
>
> I'm looking at having a dedicated backend and about half a dozen front
> ends around the house all linked with Gigabit Ethernet.
>
> For the backend, what's the best storage to go for? SATA or PATA? What are
> the benefits for the cost of SATA? I'm thinking of going hardware Raid5
> and want as much potential space as possible. What controller cards are
> people using for this? What about drives? I'm thinking of having a
> seperate drive for swap (and boot if the raid card doesn't support it).
> Then there are cases, I'd like to go rack-mount if possible.
>
> I'm in the UK and also looking for suppliers.
>
> Advice gratefully accepted.
>
> --
> Paul
>
>
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