[mythtv-users] OT: Filesystems for recordings

[Bruce Markey]

Allan Wilson wrote:
> I am planning on rebuilding my mythbackend since I got in some new 
> hardware and I am planning on using LVM to span across a couple of 

Don't. Wait a week for Storage Groups to go into svn then
mount each disk as a single spindle partition. Writing a large
continuous video file is much more efficient if the heads
are positioned and it's streamed onto the disk with minimal
head seeks. If you have multiple tuner cards, Storage Groups
will write each file to a different disk for much less I/O
contention than if the disks are lumped together into one
ambiguous partition. You will also be able to move files from
disk to disk (without adding symlinks) so you can take disks
out or add them as individual mounted partitions without having
to mess with LVM.

> drives. I have 4 or 5 video sources through PVR cards and firewire. I 
> will have somewhere in the neighborhood of 1 to 1.5 TB of storage. I was 
> wondering what everyone would recommend for using as the filesystem type 
> for the LVM storage? Last go around I was using XFS but I was wondering 
> if there was something better to use because of all the read/writes and 
> large filesystem size. So what do you think.

If you are writing just one file to one set of disk heads,
it doesn't matter what brand name of filesystem you use. The
disks will keep up. If you try to write three or more high
res files to the same heads, the brand name doesn't matter
either because you're probably going to be screwed anyway.

--  bjm