[mythtv-users] Drive specs best for Myth

[Brian Wood]

Kevin Kuphal wrote:

> Actually, one drive (root) is on the main IDE controller as master.  The 
> CD-ROM is on the secondary main IDE controller as master.  80-conductor 
> cables all round.  The other two drives are on a PCI IDE controller each 
> on their own channel as master.  Hdparm info seems identical across all 
> drives (220MB/sec for the first measurement, 60MB/sec for the second)

Sounds like you have the drives set up as well as you can with IDE/ATA
drives. I just mentioned the common setup problems because they are,
well, common.

I haven't done the math, but you may simply be pushing the limits of
what consumer-type disk I/O on a 32-bit PCI buss can do.

You may be able to get some marginal improvement by looking at PCI
latency, you also might increase the niceness level of the commflag
jobs, but that's CPU niceness, not I/O system "niceness".

There was something on this list many many months ago about decreasing
the I/O priority of a job.

Obviously going to a server type motherboard with 64-bit SCSI disk
controllers and disks would likely solve your problems, but at what is
most probably a prohibitive cost.