[mythtv-users] Setting up a separate server to store recordings.

Nick Morrott knowledgejunkie at gmail.com
Wed Oct 22 22:20:09 UTC 2008


On 22/10/2008, Kevin Kuphal <kkuphal at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 22, 2008 at 12:21 PM, C. R. Oldham <cro at ncbt.org> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > On Oct 22, 2008, at 11:01 AM, Paul Kidwell wrote:
> >
> > >
> > > I tried setting it up with various flavors of Linux with no success.
> > > RocketRaid says their board
> > > has linux drivers, but I failed in every attempt to get it running. RR
> > > tech support told me I had
> > > the wrong type hard drives. (i.e. they blew me off)
> >
> > My recommendation is that you ditch hardware RAID and use Linux kernel
> > RAID support.  It is very reliable and fast.  Consider the following:
> >
> > 1. What will you do if the RAID card goes bad?  You will likely lose
> > your entire array.  Even if you replace the RAID card my experience
> > has been if the new card is not identical in every way, it may not see
> > the array on your disks.  Linux RAID doesn't have this problem.  If
> > the machine that hosts your array keels over, you just have to attach
> > your individual disks to any other Linux machine with a similar kernel
> > revision and tell the MD system to assemble the array and you have
> > access to your data again.
> >
> > 2. Storage is cheap, I recommend using RAID 10 instead of 5.  With
> > RAID 10 you can lose 1 or possibly 2 disks and still have access to
> > your data.  With RAID 5, you can only lose 1 disk.
>
> It isn't that cheap.  RAID 10 is stripping on mirrors so you're still buying
> double your usable storage.  RAID 6 is a better option.  2 disk failures but
> you only lose a % of your usable space due to double parity.

My thoughts exactly. For MythTV, it really depends how important your
TV recordings are to you, how much storage and I/O performance you
need, whether you can justify the expense, and what your offline
backup strategy is (if you have one).

I'll go for software RAID over a proprietary card when I do roll out a
proper storage subsystem, but at the moment anything important is
backed up to memory stick or disk, and if my TV recordings are lost,
they'll be repeated soon anyway :)

-- 
Nick Morrott

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