[mythtv-users] OT: which NAS-appliance can you recommand

[Yeechang Lee]

I wrote earlier:
> By contrast, my current RAID 6 Clovertown-powered compute/storage
> server can--in addition to having much, much more
> space--simultaneously handle three HD recording streams, two HD
> playback streams, four transcoding or realtime commflag jobs at "High"
> priority, and a VMware virtual machine, without breathing hard.

I realized that the above implies that a Clovertown quad core-based
server is required to perform the above feats. While it helps, it's
not necessarily true. I've actually run out of room on the Clovertown
array (100% due to MythTV usage), and--thanks to Lincoln Dale's
multiple-directories patch for 0.20-fixes[1]--my recordings are
currently going to an array within my longtime frontend/backend box:

3.0GHz Pentium 4
3 750GB SATA drives
Linux software RAID 5 (1.5TB net capacity)
Motherboard SATA connectors

The Clovertown box--which also functions as a slave backend with no
tuners--does all the transcoding and realtime commflagging for
recordings whether located on itself or the frontend/backend, but of
course a slower slave backend would work just as well. Heck, I could
probably get away with running the jobs on the frontend/backend
itself, albeit almost certainly just a single one set to "Low" CPU
usage. The important thing to take away is that regardless of where
the recordings are being stored to, I've seen no playback or recording
hiccups. So it's the move off the reliance on the Infrant NAS that
made by far the biggest difference.

[1] I also highly recommend the following patches in order to maximize
the odds recordings are completely intact:

* ajlill's asynchronous database-update patches
  (<URL:http://svn.mythtv.org/trac/ticket/1660>).
* Boosting TFW_* settings
  (<URL:http://www.gossamer-threads.com/lists/mythtv/users/183808#183808>).
  I currently use 128/24/512.
-- 
Yeechang Lee <ylee at pobox.com> | +1 650 776 7763 | San Francisco CA US