[mythtv-users] Drive specs best for Myth

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Mon Apr 23 15:58:59 UTC 2007


Kevin Kuphal wrote:
>
> Certainly.  Would moving to SATA make any difference here?

SATA drives are still ATA drives on the same PCI buss as everything else
in your system. The main advantage to SATA these days is that the
smaller cables allow for better airflow.

SATA drives do eliminate the problems of the master/slave situation with
parallel ATA, and some SATA drives these days have larger caches than
their PATA counterparts.

Mobo makers love SATA because the connectors take up less valuable board
real estate, and they can tout "RAID" capabilities that are nothing more
than a little BIOS memory to store setup info for Windows-only software
drivers.

So it might make a "difference", but not necessarily a problem-solving
one. Also, the PATA drivers for Linux have been around longer and are
more robust than the SATA ones, which use the SCSI subsystem of the OS,
not the most efficient way to do things.

You need to isolate where the bottleneck is, playing with anything other
than the "weakest link" is a waste of time.

I suspect, however, that 3 HD streams, a couple of SD streams, video
data, perhaps ethernet, sound and who-knows-what else is just asking too
much of a consumer-grade PCI buss.

You might also want to look at your IRQ situation. If multiple
high-volume devices (like disk controllers) are sharing an IRQ that
could get you into trouble.


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