[mythtv-users] PVR Hardware Build

[moodyjunk at frontiernet.net]

Thanks for your valuable input.

> Any particular reason for this processor? You can pick up a Q6600 (only
> 2.4GHz) which, whilst slower, does have 2 extra cores, which for a workload
> like myth may actually be better. (especially if you wanted to run multiple
> transcoding jobs.)

I thought quad core would be overkill, but for $5 more it may be worth  
it just for bragging rights :-)

> Also, are you going for 32 or 64 bit? Is it worth getting more than 2G of
> memory??

I'm planning on 32 bit as it's my understanding that MythTV can't use  
64 bit and 1G is really plenty (though at the current price I doubled  
it for $20).

> Hmm, you might be able to get away with a cheaper PSU too, I don't know how
> much power your 3 tuners use, but I power mine (single cable tuner, dual
> core cpu, 2 gig mem, couple of HDs) off a 380W PSU with no issues. (It draws
> around 100W)

I super-sized the PSU to get modular cabling (so I only clutter the  
box with what I need) and handle up to 6 hard drives in the future. Is  
there a heat concern here with the super-size?  This PSU will throttle  
down under low load.

> ...have you considered some kind of RAID, or other multi drive  
> setup? >Recording/transcoding/mysqling is all quite IO intensive, so  
> 2 500G in RAID0 >would probably be more responsive than a single  
> large drive.

I hadn't considered RAID as yet.  I certainly don't need it for backup  
of recordings (not a huge loss).  My concern with striping is, the way  
I understand it, if I lose one drive all data on both drives are lost,  
though there are schemes to allow it to be rebuilt at the expense of  
redundancy.  I'll take a look at RAID0, thanks for the suggestion.