[mythtv-users] Buffering LiveTV data to save hard drive wear?

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Tue Jul 15 17:00:54 UTC 2008


On Tuesday 15 July 2008 02:23:21 Peter VanDerWal wrote:
> I've been reading recently that using ordinary hard drives in DVRs can
> cause them to wear out rapidly.  It has something to do with the heads
> constantly moving back and forth between reading and writing data streams
> while watching LiveTV, etc.
>
> Does MythTV buffer this data at all?  I.e. does it keep 3-4 seconds worth
> of data in memory so ther hard drive does constantly have to switch
> between writing ther data and going back and reading it three seconds
> later?
> If it doesn't do this, is there anyway I can set this up?
>
> I know the HDD has a built in buffer, but I don't think it's big enough to
> hold 3-4 seconds worth of data,or what ever the minimum is when watching
> LiveTV.

Linux itself does a good job of using any available RAM as a disk cache, and 
the parameters are somewhat tweakable. Myth is a DVR, let the OS decide how 
best to use system resources.
>
> On a related note, does anyone know of a good HDD optimized for DVR use?
> Preferably a quiet one?

I'm not sure what "optimized for DVR use" means. They used to sell "AV rated" 
drives but as far as I can tell that just promised the drive wouldn't decide 
to do a thermal recalibration in the middle of a recording. This is not a 
problem these days.

beww



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