[mythtv-users] Impact of external firewire drive

Brad DerManouelian myth at dermanouelian.com
Mon Jan 21 15:05:23 UTC 2008


On Jan 21, 2008, at 6:59 AM, Bruce Richardson wrote:

> I just spent the weekend setting up MythTV on an old Mac Mini G4
> (Debian testing, mythtv-0.20.2, Hauppauge WinTV Nova-TD stick,
> combination backend and frontend) and am very happy with the results.
> It's currently using the internal hd for everything and I have a  
> decent
> Firewire 400 drive I could connect to it, but being new to MythTV (and
> PVRs in general) I don't know enough to predict the results.
>
> My back-of-the-beermat calculations tell me that the bandwidth  
> should be
> fine for recording and I would expect that having the OS and data on
> different disks to reduce contention for disk io, but I just don't  
> know
> if some of the more intensive video processing work done by MythTV  
> would
> punish the firewire disk.  Opinions from MythTV veterans welcomed.
>
> -- 
> Bruce

I assume standard definition, single video stream at a time. Yes,  
firewire drive should be perfectly happy. Even recording, commflagging  
and watching at the same time shouldn't be a problem but I don't know  
if I would want to do more than that - especially if you don't have  
any other firewire devices that might be drawing bandwidth from the bus.

Your bottleneck will be the processor for the above scenario.



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