Ok.. fair enough.. getting the drives is a trivial matter... and I suppose I can understand not wanting to lose recordings... I consider the PVR a convenience rather than a long term storage system for TV... but setting up RAID isn't that much of a stretch.
<br><br>The one caveat to that is that I don't have hardware RAID available to me for the ATA-100 drives... and while I've had much fun with linux software RAID setups... I'm curious if doing software RAID with this system would be too much...
<br><br>Does anyone have any insight about performance with linux RAID?<br><br>Thanks,<br><br>Andy<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 9/23/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">Robin Smith</b> <<a href="mailto:1canuck2@gmail.com">
1canuck2@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">I work in IT, so statistically, my odds may be higher. For IBM
<br>Deskstar drives (Deathstar's as we used to call them), our failure<br>rate was a whopping 9% until they released new firmware. We are on<br>Western Digital Caviar drives and the failure rate is still around 4%.<br>My RAID5 array uses four Samsung Spinpoint SATA drives (which are
<br>quiet). I started out with just two, LVM together as you are<br>describing, and one of the bastard drives died! I got it replaced<br>under warranty and then bit the bullet and bought two more drives and<br>a RAID card as I was not happy with the risk. The type of failure I am
<br>describing are happening within the first two months of buying the<br>drive, so I think its an issue with DOA states not lifepsan stats. I<br>also have other PCs where I have been running four 80GB drives for<br>four years no problem, so I can attest to some drives also having long
<br>lifespan. Unfortunately, it seems like its a gamble though. I do not<br>buy cheap drives either, these are all high quality brand name drives.<br><br>My thought on data integrity versus performance:<br>I'll take data integrity any day. First of all, the performance you
<br>will get without striping will NOT be poor, so the striping issue is<br>somewhat moot as I'd consider it uneccesary, even with four streams<br>recording and one playing back. Data integrity was one of my goals (as<br>
well as quiet sexy looking HTPC), primarily because:<br>1. It takes a long time to set up a good Mythbox and I don't want to<br>repeat the tasks in a panic when something goes wrong with a disk.<br>2. I don't want to lose my recordings. Sure its "just" TV, but why
<br>invest the time and effort to setup a PVR and record/archive stuff if<br>you don't mind if it gets lost? I would be pissed if I lost my current<br>set of recordings. I don't want to have to archive to DVD in a timely<br>
fashion because I fear for the loss of data, that's just not<br>convenient for me.<br><br>That's my perspective anyway. To sum up, I'd basically challenge you<br>with: why stripe and increase your risk of data loss when it is
<br>completely uneccessary based on your current plans? You don't need the<br>striping performance, so don't bother taking the risk it brings.<br>Return one of your PVR350s, spend the money on a third 250GB disk and<br>set up RAID5. Four simultaneous recordings sounds cool, but how often
<br>are there four things on at one time that you won't get through<br>timeshifting? Three is still an awesome number of simultaneous<br>recordings...<br><br>Robin<br><br><br>On 9/23/06, Andy Speagle <<a href="mailto:sidrew@gmail.com">
sidrew@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>> I had the same feelings about drive lifespan... and I agree that the data<br>> isn't exactly mission critical... anything that I would want to keep would<br>> be exported on DVD or <insert media here>. I'd rather sacrifice data
<br>> integrity for my media than performance... It's going to be fun to play<br>> with this setup... as I've done this with old bt878 cards on low-end systems<br>> as a test... but never on real production quality equipment.
<br>><br>> Thanks.<br>><br>> Andy<br>><br>><br>> On 9/23/06, Michael MacLeod <<a href="mailto:mikemacleod@gmail.com">mikemacleod@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>> > If these are new drives, I suspect that the lifetime of the drive is
<br>> longer than the lifetime of his currect mythtv install. Maybe if you've been<br>> recycling the same drives through systems for the last ten years you can<br>> expect them to die on you, but seriously, two new drives are going to last a
<br>> while.<br>> ><br>> > RAID5 for a bunch of television shows is overkill. This isn't mission<br>> critical data here, and the disks in all likelyhood are going to last at<br>> least a few years. Maybe I'm just lucky, but I've never had a drive fail
<br>> inside a desktop system (I've had a laptop drive fail when the laptop failed<br>> to go to sleep when the lid closed and then went for a journey on the<br>> subway, but those are different circumstances). I've been running four of my
<br>> drives for over five years now, and they still work fine. Although, at four<br>> years, I did start mirroring the data on another set of drives.<br>> ><br>> ><br>> ><br>> > On 9/23/06, Eric Ladner <
<a href="mailto:eric.ladner@gmail.com">eric.ladner@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>> > > On 9/23/06, Robin Smith <<a href="mailto:1canuck2@gmail.com">1canuck2@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br>> > > > Yikes! Having been burned by too many dead hard drives in my life, I
<br>> > > > would never consider this option... you are essentially double your<br>> > > > chances of complete data loss.<br>> > ><br>> > > I agree completely. Either buy another drive and do RAID5, or mirror
<br>> > > the pair you have. It might not happen today or tomorrow, but<br>> > > eventually, you'll loose 500GB of data when ONE of your 250GB drives<br>> > > fail.<br>> > ><br>> > > As for throughput, consider that the average show (my average anyway -
<br>> > > I turn my settings up for better quality) is about 2.5 Gig. That<br>> > > works out to about 650K per second. I'd figure you'd have to have<br>> > > about 8 to 10 streams running at the same time before you'd start to
<br>> > > see problems.<br>> > ><br>> > > My 0.02<br>> > > --<br>> > > Eric Ladner<br>> > > _______________________________________________<br>> > > mythtv-users mailing list
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