[mythtv-users] Dual Core or Dual CPU??

[GyroTech]

Sam Varshavchik wrote:
  > The CPUs are overkill. A PVR-x50 requires little CPU support. The
> PVR-x50 hardware takes care of encoding without involvin the CPU, and 
> MPEG decoding is not that demanding. There's nothing wrong with a dual 
> Opteron, but if this is all you'll do, a Core 2 Duo will be fine. You 
> should splurge for a dual Opteron only if you want to do some heavy 
> compiling and building on the same machine.
I was thinking of the DVB-T Nova-T cards, rather than the PVR range - 
but then DVB is already in mpeg isn't it?? So that doesn't even need to 
encode that :-)

> On the other hand, forget about a RAID card. If that RAID card goes up 
> in smoke, you'll need to replace it with an exact same one, otherwise 
> the data on those disks will likely be inaccessible. You're better off 
> using Linux software RAID. Hardware RAID cards, contrary to one's first 
> impression, offer little performance benefit over softraid.

My reasoning for a hardware RAID card was for thoughput. No mobo I could 
find would have 8 SATA-II ports on it, and I could only really get PCI 
SATA cards, which them severely limits drive performance to the old PCI 
bus speed. That, plus the online RAID level changes ( eg RAID 5 -> 6 ) 
and online expansion seemed to make it worthy. It's fully 
hot-swap\hot-spare too, and even has the ability to link up with other 
RAID cards of the same chipset to give even more expansion. Really quite 
funky for less than £200...

Thanks for the thoughts though - I may have to go look into softraid a 
little harder :-)

GT