[mythtv-users] Info needed from user(s) with same mobo

Craig Huff huffcs at yahoo.com
Fri Jun 8 02:07:14 UTC 2007


I may be shopping this weekend for a new disk drive and hope someone can help
me ensure that I don't waste my money on a disk that won't do me any good
because of system limitations.

I believe I saw that at least one other MythTV user has a motherboard similar
to mine and I need some information they might be kind enough to provide me.

I have an Asus A8N-SLI Premium mobo, but I think a Deluxe will give the same
results because the only difference I can recall is a fan vs. a heat pipe cooling 
system for the nForce4 SLI chip (Southbridge?).

My situation:  It appears that I may need to make HD change(s) to support the 
intended load on my system, including support for three simultaneous PVR-x50
based recording streams.  I currently have a single 250GB WD PATA drive and
its (or the system's) I/O thruput appears wanting.

So, my alternatives include 1) dusting off a smaller PATA drive (about 20GB) to use
for everything but the /video directory, 2) getting another 250GB PATA drive to stripe
(RAID 1?) with the original to increase write thruput, 3) get one or more SATA drives,
4) spend LOTS more on a more complex fix such as an add-in RAID adapter and a 
bunch (technical term) of disks, or 5) chuck the whole mess.  I have too much invested
(and I'm too stubborn) to opt for the last option and the WAF prevents the next to last ;-)

My question to those who have a similar mobo and, unlike me, already have one (or
more) SATA drives, is this: What kind of results do you get from running the following
command against one or more partitions of the SATA disk(s)?  (Note that the man-page
advised to run the command on an otherwise idle system and collect at least three
samples to at least "eyeball-average".  Anyway here's the command with one of my
disk partitions specified; you'll need to modify for your partition:

# hdparm -tT /dev/hda5

A typical run on my system produced these results:

/dev/hda5:
 Timing cached reads:   2144 MB in  2.00 seconds = 1071.21 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  182 MB in  3.02 seconds =  60.22 MB/sec

Any volunteers?

TIA,

Craig.




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