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

[R. G. Newbury]

Derek & Cindi 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. 

I doubt that the ide drives will be appreciably slower than the sata 
drives. On gotcha however, is that some motherboards (at least some with 
an AMI Bios, get horribly confused if you attempt to mix ide and sata 
drives in the same box. I cannot now remember the Asus mb which did this 
to me, but one did. It persisted in making the first sata drive (as it 
saw them) into sda, and nothing I could do would change that. It was 
perfectly happy with an ide dvd drive on the ide channel, but the ide HD 
was *always* going to be sdb or higher. I took it back..

As to splitting the OS to another drive, the problem to be avoided, 
besides actual hard drive death, is a run-away error condition which 
fills /tmp and /var. Put /home on its own partition, point mysql into 
that partition (by symlink is easy) and possibly /var/www/html (or 
whatever your http doc_root is) so they do not get trashed.

Then if /tmp runs away, nothing gets damaged. ( I filled /tmp on the 
weekend by forgetting to stop a 'azap' and 'cat /dev/dvb/adapter... > 
/tmp/junk.ts' My myth instance stopped showing any recordings, but no 
damage was done.) Well worth the peace of mind.

As to the video storage, well it's only TV. I would rather split it 
between drives, than RAID it. BUT if it is also a file server, different 
considerations apply.

Geoff


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