[mythtv-users] Dec 2008 - State of the Art - Hard Drive Recommendations?

[Sandy Walsh]

Hi all,

Seems like this is a question that occurs pretty regularly, so let's 
take a snapshot of the "state-of-the-art" for hard drive selection. I'd 
love to hear all of your opinions on the following.

What would you say are the most important criteria for selecting a PVR 
hard drive?

1. Is it Interface? PATA? SATA? ATA-100, 133, 150, 300?

2. Capacity? Is it simply Gigabytes per Dollar (G/$) or do drives just 
get flaky over a certain size?

3. Is it Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF)? Is this a meaningful metric 
anymore?

4. What about RAID? Good or Bad? Good for peace of mind, Bad for 
performance? Recommendations for/against using RAID? What about software 
raid (useless?)

5. Rotational Speed? Is it a factor?

6. Average Seek Time? Do technologies like Western Digital Intelliseek 
make any difference or just get in the way?

7. Vendors? Seagate? Western Digital? Hitachi? Samsung? Any warrenty 
horror stories? Others to consider?

8. Cache size? Since this is mostly a Write operation activity does 
cache really affect performance? How important is a large cache?

What else?

Ultimately ... what do you recommend and why?

Thanks in advance everyone! This will greatly assist my Christmas 
shopping list!

Cheers,
Sandy





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