[mythtv-users] Home media system

[Brian Wood]

Mike Dent wrote:
>>> What would you say for the back end box   i was thinking along the lines of
>>> AMD 64x2  8Gb Ram  300Gb Sata for the system then a few Tb of NAS storage for
>>> data / recordings  , Then there is the question of the DVD Play side what
>>> drives are there out ther that can simultainiousley(SP)  play say 2 or 3 DVD
>>> films or is it a case of multiple single drives ?
>> The OS and Myth don't require anything close to 300GB. You storage
>> system, whether NAS or local, needs as much speed as possible. I'd
>> consider RAID not so much for redundancy as for the speed. RAID0 is
>> actually the fastest, but increases the risk of a bad drive taking it down.
> 
> Yeah, 300gb is way over the top if its dedicated myth box only. I'd
> expect an 80gb disk would be plenty for system.

Actually 40gb is overkill, but you'd be hard put to find one today, or
even an 80.

It could be argued that a larger drive will give faster seek times, if
the data is properly arranged, because it doesn't have to seek but a
small portion of the total, but I wouldn't put too much stock in that
argument. The geometry that's perceived by the OS probably has nothing
to do with the actual physical location on the platter stack.

Actually, the solid-state drives are getting cheap enough that one might
want to consider one for the OS, but if you have a lot of RAM it's
buffering most of the often-accessed stuff anyway. Myth users usually
don't care about faster startup speed.

As for the DVD drives, I'd think you would want those to be on the
frontends, where the viewer can access them, and nobody I know can watch
more than 1 DVD at a time, so I'd stick with the single drives.

Or, assuming you live where it is legal, you could rip the DVDs and
store the data along with the recordings.


beww