[mythtv-users] OT: help selecting drives for server

[John Drescher]

> John,
>
> What's the advantage of using storage groups?  I am running svn and have noted that
> storage groups are much more expanded then in 0.21 -- but I really don't get
> their advantage over using something like symlinks....  (expect the scenario where
> you are saving a tv series to a particular folder, but that requires editing myth-setup
> every time you want to add a new series (right?))
>

The big thing is flexibility and not having to have an enormous single
filesystem or multiple large ones with symlinks.. Storage groups allow
you to define a set of independent file systems to use as storage for
recordings and mythtv will manage spreading the load across the
systems for you. If you want you can make some of these remote nodes.
You can easily add more storage groups to your setup and also move
files from one member of the storage group to another. Mythtv will
automatically find it without any other intervention. I have been
using this since I switched to svn 0.21 in November of 2006. Before
that I used lvm on top of software raid5. Also with independent
elements you can spin down some of your disks instead of powering them
all the time. I have 7 hard drives for usage in mythtv and currently 3
of them are powered. I did have to arrange my data to put lesser used
stuff on disks that would be mostly powered off though.


John