[mythtv-users] Building a library.....chews up space!!

[Richard Morton]

On 29 March 2011 00:39, Raymond Wagner <raymond at wagnerrp.com> wrote:
> On 3/28/2011 18:57, Richard Morton wrote:
>>> With 2TB drives being readily available for $70 online, you're trading
>>> $0.10 in hard drive capacity for $0.10 in power consumption, and you're
>>> wasting a whole lot of your own and your CPU time to do so.  You may as
>>> well just skip the whole process, and buy whatever storage you need to
>>> store the content as-is.
>> Isnt that just half the electric/power consumption story, with only
>> requiring 1 drive instead of 3, you also have 1/3 the harddrive power
>> consumption, which over a year could also be considerable.. or am I
>> missing something?
>
> If you put the machine into standby, or even just allow the drives to
> spin down, they will consume next to no power.  Even if you don't, an
> idle 3.5" drive will only consume 4-6W of power, or roughly equivalent
> to $4-$6 per year in electricity.

agreed.

$6

300 films
.mpg = broadcast MPEG2 with adverts cut;
.mkv = transcoded to h264


-rwxrwxrwx 1 myth mythtv 865M 2010-12-30 07:23 videos/films/Star Trek
1 The Motion Picture.mkv
-rwxrwxrwx 1 myth mythtv 1.6G 2010-10-19 18:23 videos/films/Star Trek
1 The Motion Picture.mpg

= 50% saving and took much less than 2 hours of CPU time on (a now
old) Q6600 quadcore; which is always running, cause it is a file and
web server as well as a mythbox.

so a 500gb drive can store 300 films mpeg2 or 600films h264; at next
to no real electric cost... and as there is a recurring $6 (or £6 in
the uk) electric cost, and you have equated 1w-year to equal $1 (I was
told £1)...

1w-year = 365*24 = 8760 watt-hours

difference between idle and full load power consumption for the q6600
is 55w and 102w equals a difference of 47w for 2 hours = 94watt-hours

94/8760 * £or$6 = 6centsORpence

so the power saving of not powering a single drive ($6) pays for 100
transcodes per year, and not paying for a drive ($60) pays for many
many many more (1000 transcodes)...

not to mention the aircon costs to keep additional drives cool (or
cool the house that the drive is in), the more drives you have the
more you have to replace through wear and tear, backups, etc...
seriously the cost of storage is not just the drive cost and a tiny
bit of electric.

so it isnt clearcut...