[mythtv-users] backend hardware recommendations

[Steven Adeff]

On 10/5/06, Yan Seiner <yan at seiner.com> wrote:
> I think the time has come to bite the bullet and get some new hardware
> for my backend....
>
> I had to reboot the server and two of the IDE harddrives refused to come
> up; there's resets on the SCSI bus, and it's still running FC2.... So
> it's time.
>
> Can someone recommend a backend platform?
>
> I am looking specifically for energy efficient solutions, something with
> CPU throttling and a relatively small number of hard drives.  Ideally I
> want a dual CPU (or dual core), I'm not wedded to AMD or Intel.
>
> The platform will also act as a web server which generates most of the
> SQL usage, but still, even with 1 GHz CPUs the usage is often near
> idle.  The only time it redlines is when transcoding; it takes about 4
> hours to transcode 1 hour of myth recordings with 1 CPU pegged at 100%.
>
> Lots of PCI slots.  I use a PVR 150 and a HD3000; I have a BT878-based
> tuner that I could throw in there as well if I had the CPU horsepower.
>
> And, of course, I need gobs and gobs of cheap hard drive space.  I've
> used SCSI software RAID for the OS and SQL partitions but I'm not sure
> if that is necessary with the new SATA.

I find my Athlon64 3200+ does great as my backend with a PVR150, and 3
HD tuners. Commflagging doesn't take too long either. Plus they're
cheap now. Really, your going to have to see how much speed you want
to pay for. The Core 2 Duo's are nice, but they're a little more money
than the Athlon64's (but a good deal faster).

Then find a motherboard. Newegg has a great Advanced/Power Search
feature that should help this. Since its a backend onboard video/sound
aren't a priority.

SATA allows you to not need SCSI. I'd suggest going with a RAID5 or
RAID10 array for recordings, depending on what speed/redundency level
you want. I'd also suggest 1GB of RAM, you can increase your SQL cache
sizes.

There are some more server oriented motherboards with 6 or greater
SATA ports as well. Don't worry about 150vs300, for our purposes
they're basically the same.

-- 
Steve
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