[mythtv-users] Drive specs best for Myth

[Yan Seiner]

Kevin Kuphal wrote:
>>   
>>     
> Certainly.  Would moving to SATA make any difference here?
>   
I think much of that depends on the controller....

My old server was PCI based, but server-class hardware.  64 bit PCI, 
SCSI on board, all that.  All my myth stuff was on 4 IDE drives 
connected via cheap IDE adapters plugged into the PCI slots; the system 
never glitched and never had a problem with throughput.

My new server is SATA based, but mid-range consumer class.  I am 
experiencing periodic glitches in play back; occasionally I will get the 
"pre-buffering pause" thing and the movie/music will pause for a 
fraction of a second.

I haven't isolated this problem but I suspect it is due to the SATA 
implementation on the mobo.  I can bring my remote FE to a complete 
prebuffering hell by trying to play a recording while it is being 
recorded on the BE....  It's as if the drives just cannot access the 
same file twice, once for reading and once for writing.... It's pretty 
bizarre, but I can't think of any other explanation.  Live TV works 
fine, though....

Also, sometimes I get a very, very long pause at the beginning of 
playback - 15 seconds or so.  It's as if something somewhere has to fill 
a large cache very slowly....

Again, just qualitative observations; I haven't done anything definitive 
to track this down.

One obvious and relatively inexpensive test would be to swap out my 100 
MBit switch for an enterprise gigabit switch, to eliminate the old 
switch as a source of the problem.  (That switch is about 10 years old; 
it's served its time...)

--Yan