[mythtv-users] Optimal disk configuration for MythTV?

[Jelte Veldstra]

>
> 2x Large capacity hard drives in RAID 1 for Myth Video, torrent server, and
> fileserver.  There is some stuff on here I don't want to lose so RAID is a
> must.
>

Please note that RAID != backup. While it can save you trouble when
losing a single disk, it will not save you when you (accidentally)
delete files or have some process corrupting data or the filesystem.

Your reasoning totally makes sense and at the end it is also personal
preference. Here's perhaps a different approach: Years back I also
used on RAID on my backend system. Then I realised the total power
consumption of all these drives. Now I'm back to a two disk setup
where one is spinned down all the time. Every night a rsnapshot job
wakes the second drive up and copies the important stuff to it after
which it can spin down again (another rsnapshot job copies it over ssh
to a Linux host 10 miles away from me for offsite backups). For me the
advantages are less power consumption (one idle green drive and a spun
down drive take up about ~6W total) and rsnapshot keeps multiple
copies, so even when a file gets corrupted or had multiple edits I can
recover further back in time (12 weeks in my case). Should the number
of concurrent recordings increase I may decide to add a 1TB laptop
drive to cope with the increased IO. That extra drive can be spun down
as well only to come alive when a recording is done or played back.