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

[David Rees]

On Sat, Dec 20, 2008 at 9:32 PM, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh at mimosa.com> wrote:
> | From: John Drescher <drescherjm at gmail.com>
>
> | Buy only 7200 rpm drives. Or if you want the 5400/7200 dual speed wd drives
>
> I don't think that there are any dual (or variable) speed WD drives.
>
> If you are refering to WD GP drives, the current models are 5400RPM
> but the specs try to disguise this.  Testing reveals all.
>
> http://www.storagereview.com/1000.sr?page=0%2C1
>
> Even so, these drives might well be a good choice for Myth: it isn't
> obvious to me whether the speed difference matters to Myth; Myth
> boxes are often on all the time so power consumption might matter
> more.

I recently swapped out my old 320gb Seagate 7200.10 with the WD GP
500gb model on my myth system. It has two tuners in it.

Sequential read/write performance is similar to the Seagate and
obviously random IO suffers a bit, but none of that is an issue, the
drive is plenty fast.

It does run about 5 degrees cooler than the Seagate (according to
smart, anyway) and it's also very quiet. I have a Kill-A-Watt, but
unfortunately I didn't measure the before/after idle power draw, but I
expect it to have gown down by at least 4w.

I'd buy the drive again for the myth system - not sure if I'd do it
for the desktop - I really want a Velociraptor for that...

-Dave