[mythtv-users] New Myth setup - questions about storage.

[Simon Hobson]

Derek Cass wrote:

>I am rebuilding my mythbox to take advantage of 4 new 640GB drives 
>that I now have.  I am planning on putting them together in a RAID5 
>array for recordings and to use as a file server for all the 
>computers on my home network.
>
>I am planning on putting the OS on a separate hard drive, and 
>therein lie my questions.  I have a few hard drives to choose from, 
>a 80GB ide, 120GB ide, a 160 GB SATA, and a 500GB SATA.  I would 
>prefer to use the SATA drives in other computers in the house, but I 
>am concerned about system performance using the slower ide drives as 
>the OS drive.  The optical drive in this system is also an ide 
>drive, although it doesn't get much use.  I am aware of performance 
>issues with a hard drive and an optical drive sharing the same 
>channel, but I only rip the (very) occasional DVD; I never use it as 
>a CD or DVD player since the mythbox is hidden away in a closet. 
>The motherboard in this system (Gigabyte M57SLI-S4) only has 1 ide 
>channel, so the OS drive and optical drive would have to share it.
>
>Should I use the ide drive as my main drive?
>Are there any issues with using ide and sata in the same system?

For reference, I have a single WD 'Green' drive in my backend - and 
that's a Xen box running 4 VM of which Myth is just one. Just a 
single tuner, but doing multirec.

Mixing IDE (aka PATA) and SATA should not be a problem. And any of 
your drives should be OK for the OS and Myth program/DB.

I think general consensus on the list has been that you don't really 
need to use RAID for your Myth storage - Myth will do some balancing 
between drives and in general you don't need huge bandwidth off any 
single drive (but that depends on your usage - particularly if you do 
commflagging or transcoding). So it might be better to split the 
drives up and have part of each one in a raid array for your file 
server, and the rest as single drives for Myth storage.

-- 
Simon Hobson

Visit http://www.magpiesnestpublishing.co.uk/ for books by acclaimed
author Gladys Hobson. Novels - poetry - short stories - ideal as
Christmas stocking fillers. Some available as e-books.