[mythtv-users] Best Hardware

[match at ece.utah.edu]

On 9 May 2006 at 19:00, Marco Nelissen wrote:

> >Basic setup:
> >3.4 +/- P4 OR Duel Xeon (64bit)
> >SATA HDDs (4-6 drives, all 300G+)
> 
> Out of curiosity (since other people have mentioned similar
> storage for their mythtv machines), what does one do with upwards
> of 1 terabyte of storage for a mythtv box? I mean, I realize that
> HD needs a lot of space, but with that much space you could
> easily store 100+ hours of HDTV. Why? Are you guys collecting
> entire shows by the season, do you not watch anything for 3
> months at a time and then have a weeklong marathon session, or
> is most of the storage used for non-mythtv purposes?
> Just curious.

You know, that's a really good question. I admit that it's just 
bragging rights for the most part.

I have 2TB, and I fill it up with more stuff than I ever have time to 
watch. It's just so easy to go into scheduling and say "Yeah, I need 
that... and that... Oh and I can't miss that..." Maybe it's a 
sickness... I admit it! It's just too easy.

Before you know it you've got every disk full.

I  dunno what the answer is. Just let it autoexpire, I guess.

I've adopted the philosophy that I delete every show that I watch as 
soon as I watch it, and I never re-record. Many of the shows that I 
record are broadcast numerous times (like Modern Marvels, Histories 
Mysteries, etc.) and I'm finding that my backend records one or two 
hours every couple of days now instead of 6 or 8, just because I've 
already recorded, watched and deleted most of what interests me. I'm 
just about to the point where I watch about as many hours as gets 
recorded. Another month or so and I expect that the trend will be 
reversed and I'll be watching and deleting more hours than are being 
recorded, just because I've already burned through most of what's on 
every day.

Oh yes, I watch almost everything at 1.5 time stretch, sans 
commercials. In fact I've learned to prefer the fast playback for 
most programs and I find watching most shows at 1X speed to be very 
annoying, so an hour of recorded programming takes me 20 minutes or 
so to watch. 

I come into work and my co-workers will say "Have you seen such-and-
such commercial? That was really clever." and I have no clue what 
they're talking about because I don't watch commercials... ever... 
except Superbowl commercials, which weren't that good this time.

And it's easy to get to 2 TB of storage. One of the vendors will have 
a sale, and, well... you just gotta buy another 400GB Seagate! This 
is too good a deal to pass up. You justify it by convincing yourself 
that you are finally going to archive all your DVD movies, or all the 
video you shot while the kids were growing up, or all the snapshots, 
or your whole CD collection... Yeah. I'm going to do all that... 
Really... Someday.

Marvin